Original Post
Hiya,
Okay, I have a big mesh. Say it''s a terrain tile. I have a main texture (stretched over the entire tile). I have a detail texture (which I tile over this tile, making nice rocky looking details).
I also want to blend this tile into the tile next to it (they have different textures). I want to do this at run time, so I have an alpha texture.
The worst case is that this tile is bordered on the 4 sides by 4 other tiles all having different main textures. So to draw this, currently I''m doing:
--- Pass 0 ---
Stage 0 - the main texture
Stage 1 - the detail texture
Render the tile
for each differing neighbor
{
--- Pass 1 ---
Stage 0 - the main texture of the neighbor
Stage 1 - the alpha texture
Render the tile again
--- Pass 2 ---
Stage 0 - the detail texture of the neighbor
Stage 1 - the alpha texture
Render the tile again
}
I''m just looking for ideas as to maybe speed this up a little bit. I mean first of all, assuming a HW T&L card, it''s going to have to re-transform and light all the vertices each time right? Is there a faster way, while still making use of HW T&L?
Does anyone know off hand of a way to maybe squeeze this rending into less passes? I can only safely assume 2 stages on a Geforce.
Thanks!