i was wondering how and if it was possible to render one texture to say a wall texture. for example i have a character spewing tons of blood ~1000 decaled particles. i want the blood to stay but without the particle quads. is it possible to render the particle decal to a texture to lower the vertex count of a scene but it does not effect the original texture? heres a drawing:

heres a wall with a particle attatched:
----------------------
|          _         |
|         |_|        |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
----------------------
 

whatever the texture of that particle is i want to embed it into the wall texture. get it? any ideas? Umm... yeah... that would be great... -Bill Lumberg

I'm confused, do you or don't you want to modify the base texture? >>but it does not effect the original texture<< and >>i want to embed it into the wall texture<<

I think it would be more expensive to have dynamic textures for every wall? I would just go with decals because as long as you have spatial partitioning it shouldn't affect much.

EDIT
By the way, the decals can have a life span and/or cap anyway. If the decals life is reaching toward the end, fade it out and recycle it. If you have a cap of say 50 decals, that would work to. In other words, say you shoot an uzi and have 50 decals on the wall. When you shoot the 51'st decal just recycle the first decal or reposition it to the new position. This will keep your limit low and still look good at the same time. Just an idea?

-UltimaX-

"You wished for a white christmas... Now go shovel your wishes!"

[edited by - UltimaX on November 10, 2003 1:46:24 AM]

I don''t really get the question, but if you want the wall to look different without editing the original texture, just draw a second transparent texture on top of it and edit that one...

basically i want the engine to load a texture into the game from somewhere. in the game i want blood particles to be permanently stuck to the wall. instead of letting the particles have no life span (which would kill the performance) i wanted to "glue" or "embed" the particle to the wall texture. once the particle was rendered to the texture i could kill the particle. it would drastically improve the particle performance and make scenes more graphic and "pretty".

this has a side effect though..once you modify a texture (eg.get blood on it) it will remain modified(bloody) even for walls that shouldnt be(bloody).

does the blood spew out from the same place all the time??

if so (or even if not).. why don''t you have a few wall textures with blood already applied. then all you have to do is change the texture rendered if the wall is marked as having blood on it..

you know i never thought about that lilKen.

Jumpman i was thinking something like emptying an uzi on a zombie or a monster. i have seen a couple of cut scenes from silent hill 3 that give a great example.

this is just a thought but could it be done with the stencil buffer much like shadows are done? project the blood texture onto the wall and get it to stay (w/o a quad).

Here''s what you do, as I see it:

Once all the particles have come to rest against the wall, render them to a single texture (dynamically allocated; make sure you keep track of your texture indices)with a transparent background, and then texture a quad with it, which you''ll put on the wall instead of all 1000 of the blood particles.

That should work; although you''ll have to do some math to get the texture to be the right size, since it''s in perspective view and all (I''m assuming); maybe you should just put it in Ortho view to do the rendering to texture, and then switch back.

dude thanks that would definitly work!! thanks man. if it needs more particles attatched i can just render more to it. sweet!