Shaders -- How do I add them?

[Aiee]

One of the things that had me really excited about JK2 was the idea of shaders. those nifty things from Q3 that allows you to add animations and similar interesting effects to skins and textures. judging from some of the energy textures in the games levels, the shaders are in JK2, so now I'm wondering how to go about using them.

 

Basically, I have a skin I'm workin gon. The body armor of the skin is covered with fiberoptic wires, and I'm looking for a good way to make these glow and pulsate eeriely as I run around in the game.

 

My knowledge of the use and nature of shaders rests somewhere around the high end of nothing. If anyone could provide me with insigt on how to create one of these and apply it to my models skin (I'm using the shadowtrooper model as a base), I would be eternally grateful.

[Aiee]

Ok... I figured out how to create a shader (found a manual for them for Q3, and managed to make a shader that applies a glowing texture to specific parts of the torso.tga file. However, they do not show up ingame. Could anyone explain to me where shaders are defined? do I need to add them to the .skin file?

[Jafo]

Without being too longwinded you might want to readup on some tutorials over at Polycount. If you were to add glow to the wires I would first make an alpha channel for the places where the wires will be then use a shader script to assign my effects to the alpha channel. It is a lot of work so all I can say is you want to look for a skinning tutorial that uses the alpha channel and maybe some basic copy and paste script from a shader file. Learning the entire shader manual would be the only other way and while it isnt all that tuff it is time consuming. You can also download or open skins that you see a similar effect on and use the script for the skin as a base. Hope this helped a little.

[Jafo]

Actually after rereading your post I see what your asking. If you already have the areas made and the shader code then make a folder in the base directory named shader and put you shader file in the directory. When the game loads it loads the shader.

[Aiee]

Thanks, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I am using the shader manual (Heck, once you've chewed through php, C++ and Java manual, the shader manual isn't that much worse than Winnie the Pooh , but my resource told me to place the shaders in /scripts. After checking and noticing that JK2 kept everythign in /shaders, I moved mine and voila. Pulsating bits and glowy bits all over the armor. Right now, I'm fighting the urge to go overboard and trace tron-like patterns all over the poor guy ;]

[UniKorn]

Here's an alpha channel explanation focused on skinning.

 

http://www.planetquake.com/baneforge/tutorials/af101.htm

 

UniKorn

Mapper 4 Wired Lamp Studios

http://www.wiredlampstudios.com