Surface Properties in Ogre?

[Viridian]

Hello.

I model with Lightwave. Recently I was approched by a game-building group who plan to use Ogre and asked to join their team. They don't know a lot about the 3D side of things (yet ), and have a few questions I'm currently unable to answer. I may be phrasing my searches incorrectly... after an hour of searching I'm still lost.

Can the latest Ogre engine display these surface properties?

Luminosity (glowing surfaces)

Diffusion

Specularity

Glossiness

Reflection (not environmental reflection, but just the basic property)

Lens flares (I've read about bilboard sprites, but don't really understand if this is something different or a work-around)

Many apologies if this is covered somewhere else (I can't seem to find any of it except transparency).

Thanks.

[sinbad]

Luminosity (glowing surfaces)

There is an 'emissive' property of material. Note that this just self-illuminates, to actually 'glow' you need a post-processing shader.

Diffusion

If you mean something like sub-surface scattering, shaders again.

Specularity
Glossiness

There are specular and shininess terms in the material definition, if you want more control you're into shaders again.

Reflection (not environmental reflection, but just the basic property)

Yes, but be aware that a true reflection requires a render-to-texure which increases cost, see Demo_RenderToTexture.

Lens flares (I've read about bilboard sprites, but don't really understand if this is something different or a work-around)

That's not a material property, that's just a separate effect you have to create with geometry (like Billboards).

I'm guessing you're coming from a non-realtime background. Realtime rendering requires a different approach to many problems simply because there isn't the time to do what offline renderers do. If you want the best control, you will want to learn how to use shaders.

[Viridian]

Thanks Sinbad!

I'll do some research on shaders.