Claude Heiland-Allen wrote:
You will need to write a shader to do your lighting. ..
You won't be able to use the Gem objects for lighting once you use a shader, they work in a different way (only for fixed function pipeline, without shaders). With shaders you need to send messages to the glsl_program object to set uniform variables. This also means you have to do your own maths for the transformations, not using translate/rotate objects.
Thanks Claude for reply.
I just invested some time studying some shader tutorials and examples. I can see how I could use them for a number for other related tasks.
But the inability to use translate/rotate objects with shaders is probably a killer for my current simulation, as I am simulating LEDs that have to be able to move, and that movement is relative to (and bound to) other non-light objects in the scene.
I can see from some of the shader examples how one might be able to simulate some glowing effects nicely, such as for the halo around a street lamp, to evoke the impression of many lights in a row.
But I am not sure whether one could use shaders to create a really clear pointing light effect with clear shining of the light projected onto distant objects.
One of the main points of the demonstration is to show the result of the projection of many (30) driven LEDs onto other surfaces.
The (transformable) [light]+[spot_light] work together nicely for this for my LED simulation.
Darren