Milo got a question.

[John DiCamillo]

The way glows are done in realtime software is to render all of the glowing pixels to an offscreen surface, then apply a blur filter to the surface and render a single huge quad that covers the entire screen with the glow buffer on it using additive alpha. Of course this means that the 3D chip has to read-modify-write every pixel on the display to add the glow.

Stencil shadows are done basically the same way, except that you first have to render the shadow volumes into a stencil buffer. Then you overdraw the entire screen with a transparent gray shadow color, but you tell the 3D chip to only render pixels that are set in the stencil buffer. So you have to read every pixel in the stencil buffer, and read-modify-write every shadowed pixel on the display.

Newer cards like the Radeon and GeForce 6 have enough horsepower to do those kinds of operations in realtime, but they tend to crush my poor GF4MX420, to say nothing of good old fashioned TNT2 cards. [:)]

[Pheonix Starflare]

For crying out loud, get yourself a new video card!

[DamoclesX]

Wow,

all I have to say is.. GET A NEW VIDEO CARD!!

We need to start a "buy milo a new computer" fund here i'm thinking lol!

As for the explanations, man, reading what milo writes is always an education lol, I should get him to talk about my electronics course lol:)

[DamoclesX]

Well

I got my copy of 3dmax7 today, guess what they added

Industry-leading normal mapping tools: 3ds max 7 animation technology includes all new tools for creating normal maps and previewing the results in the viewport using DX9 shaders. Plus, 3ds max 7 is now the first major 3D application to support normal maps in the rendering process, allowing artists to add amazing detail while limiting the total volume of geometry in a scene.

I"ll get back if it drastically changes anything