3DS Exporters - advanced material setup

[JDX_John]

As a non-artist, could someone help me understand how much functionality the common exporters provide for setting up complex materials - i.e. with shaders and multiple schemes/techniques/passes/etc? Is this realistically done in 3DS or would people normally create their materials and shader scripts externally to override simpler exported versions?

I'm focusing primarily on OgreMax here but general understanding of a typical 3DS-Max/Ogre pipeline would be helpful too.

Thankyou.

[JDX_John]

Bump - I still didn't find an answer to this. In my application I have some special techniques linked to shaders, as well as a "regular 3D rendering" technique. Every time we export using OgreMax, all the special stuff gets wiped out as the exported.material has only a single, simple technique for each material.

I thought maybe I could split the special techniques into a separate .material file, but my tests indicate Ogre doesn't let you split one material across multiple files.

So surely others have similar issues, how do you deal with them?

[JDX_John]

I did note OgreMax's help pages about techniques and passes, but while this is a lot more comprehensive than I imagined, I still think it lets me down because I work with abstract passes/techniques which are then inherited by materials - and also then my material files have to #import the correct files for these abstract definitions.

Maybe this is possible, can anyone clarify? I was actually hoping/looking for a "custom" option where the artist could just copy-paste my pre-written definitions... in my project the 3D modeler guy is not the same person as the shader guy.