Re: Lights and Alpha

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> Ok, let's make things clear: what is the final result you want to achieve
> with your code?
> Alpha blending operations use the background color (a texture, or the color
> of the background itself) AND the object color. Maybe the unwanted effect is
> caused by the ambient color you've set for the materials. What I understood
> is that you want a texture quad in the background and a rotating cylinder in
> front of it, being the cylinder translucent. Is it correct? Describe your
> objective and we can figure it out in DirectX managed code.

Again, thank you for your continued help.

I have learned 3 things!

1. Even a textured mesh / quad needs a material set if it is to correctly
reflect light.
2. I suspect I have been applying world transforms before setting the light
direction which (with some fluffiness in my interpretation of directions)
is responsible for some of my confusion.
3. If you are drawing transparent tectures you need to draw them in reverse
Z Order - the ones at the back first (thanks to ZMan in a nearby post).

I've not yet applied these lessons back into my app, but I'm sure that
there will be no problems.

I'm left with TWO issues right now. A hard one (I think) and a less hard
one.

The application is meant to display messages on a large screen. The
messages themselves will be selected on a small screen and there will be
various means for editing an ordering them. There will also be a preview
of what is happening on the big screen.

So I need a straightfoward C#app running on a secondary display which has a
D3D window running with some animation. At the same time the animation
should be rendering on the primary display in full screen mode.

In a pinch, I might get away with the full screen running in a window,
though I'm not entirely happy with that.

So Full and windowed operation on a multimonitor PC in a managed
application is (what I think) is the hard one.

THe other one is easier. I was naively expecting shadows from the lights.
Ha! Silly me. I've found some stuff on shadows in unmanged (though I've
not looked in detail), but there's not much about shadows in unmanaged.
THis one is for a future project so it's less important.

So that's where I am. Thanks for your patience.



Iain
--
Iain Downs (DirectShow MVP)
Commercial Software Therapist
www.idcl.co.uk
.

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