I really shouldn’t have spoken so soon. Today (well, yesterday now since it’s 3am) didn’t go anywhere near as well as Monday; I polished off the new shadows section in the manual alright, but then I decided I would try to create myself a normal mapped model for use in the shadow demo. A few hours later I was still tinkering with Melody (nVidia’s normal mapper) and swearing at the 3DS format for not supporting vertex normals. I got there eventually, the model I’m using was originally 91,000 polys, and I’ve reduced it to 6,000 and it still looks nice. I actually managed to get it down to 3,000 but since I want to use it for stencil shadows I dedided to leave the detail up a little higher to avoid dodgy silhouette edges.
So, once I finally got that done, I started working on the demo, and promptly discovered a few additional bugs I’d missed when I was using my PlayPen as a test environment. It’s always the same. I’ve nailed all the ones I’ve seen, but it’s eaten up my time for today, I’ll have to carry on tomorrow.