Specular shading and transparencies?

[PalnGipanji]

Hi everyone...

 

I'm wanting to add small specular highlights to my saber model using shaders, but I haven't really found any help on this so far. I tried looking at the cheshire_vader shaders to see if I could figure it out from the helmet speculars, but it seemed as if it was based on a specular map. Would the map rotate to find the light? I guess I'm not exactly sure how using a texture would work as a specular map, except to only make the object shiny in specific places.

 

So I guess my question is, how would I go about adding a small specular glint to my saber hilt using shaders? Is it possible to control the size of the highlight?

 

Also, I am having a shading problem with a player skin as well. What I am trying to do is use the original model skins to create differing levels of model transparency without having duplicate copies of the existing textures with appropriately-shaded alpha channels. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be possible, but it's not working for me so far, and I'm not really sure how to specify in the skin file that I want the texture to be the shaded version and not the original.

 

Here's an example of that problem:

I want the model to be at 40% visibility, so here is the shader code I wrote to handle that:

 

models/players/paln_gipanji/torso_40vis

{

{

map models/players/paln_gipanji/torso.tga

blendFunc .4 .6

}

}

 

I tried changing the blendFunc line from blendFunc GL_SRC_ALPHA GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA to blendFunc .4 .6, just to see if it would work. I realize though that I need to specify that in the alpha channel, but I'm not exactly sure how to make explicit blends. If anyone knows how to do this, please let me know!

[Emon]

1. I believe the "specular shading" on the Vader helmet is just a texture like you said, it's an "environment" map, usually used for cheap, fast reflections (2D, rendered very fast), and can also be used for a metallic sheen as seen in the Kejim levels (the floor). I think that's about the most the engine can do for specular shading. All you want is a shader with *I think* the tcGen thingy on it and use an environment map of a metallic sheen texture.

 

2. Don't really know about the second one.