I am having trouble to render 3DS files in Opengl. I can load everything I need (including materials and smooth groups). But the results I get are not that great. One of the things that goes wrong is smoothing. I used some code I found to use smooth groups. But I don''t understand how it works. I also couldn''t find anything on the internet. Is there someone who could explain it to me? It would be a great help. Another thing that goes wrong is that the colors look like crap. I can use a viewer to view the results as I would like them to be but I can''t find out how that program get''s those results. I can look in the source code of it but I can''t find it. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any help.

I''ve got code that renders .3ds files great at InterfaceFX but I haven''t been able to anything on smoothing groups. If you''d like me to take a look, send the code to me (mike.underhill@interfacefx.com).

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Visit Particle Stream Studios - Home of Europa, Tachyon and winSkin

Thanks for the offer but I found what smoothing groups are. It''s the way 3DS files handles vertex normals. Each face in a smoothing group that has a vertex in common with another face of that smoothing group should combine their face normals in order to create vertex normal for that vertex.

Cool, can you point me to the information that you mentioned.

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Visit InterfaceFX - Home of Europa, Tachyon and winSkin

I found it during a search on the message forum of Flipcode. Use the link to get to the search page. Then seek for "3ds". It should give a lot of hits concerning 3ds files. A few of them should deal with normals.

http://www.flipcode.com/forums/search.shtml

A direct link to some information about the subject is:
http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi?showThread=00000849&forum=3dtheory&id=-1