I'm wondering if there's any simple tool like this that exists-
Loads a model in some basic format like OBJ, and then lets you apply multiple texture maps- color, lightmap, bump/specular/environment/whathaveyou map, and see how it all looks together. (Extra awesome-points if it could then spit out a ready-for-openGL file...)

I've made some models in Wings3D, which had pretty rudimentary texture support.

Another, not-completely-unrelated question: Does anyone know how "spattered" rather than tiled texture maps are done? I am thinking of the ground textures I saw in World of Warcraft- the individual texture squares blend at the edges and (I think) are rotated and randomly placed so you don't get that bathroom floor effect. Is this a built-in texturing mode anyone can use, or just an example of some fancy coding?

If you have access to a windows box, ATI's RenderMonkey is quite good as a shader development environment. If not, there's a new GLSL editor that comes with Xcode 2.3's examples, but you'd have to modify it to get it to load your own models.

There's no such thing as a "ready-for-OpenGL" file format; OpenGL knows nothing of file formats.

I suspect you're giving WoW too much credit, but either way, it's just fancy coding.

haxolotl Wrote:Another, not-completely-unrelated question: Does anyone know how "spattered" rather than tiled texture maps are done? I am thinking of the ground textures I saw in World of Warcraft- the individual texture squares blend at the edges and (I think) are rotated and randomly placed so you don't get that bathroom floor effect. Is this a built-in texturing mode anyone can use, or just an example of some fancy coding?

It's almost certainly done something like this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~jvan006/mu...titex.html

A large color map with detail textures blended on top. Then it's just artistic skill to keep it from looking tiled. Also, they drew the terrain in chunks. The chunk you were in was drawn with full texturing. Then farther chunks were drawn with just the colormap textures and lighting (shadowmap). Then the farthest terrain was drawn with no lighting or texturing at all. Fog and the farplane obscures the lack of detail.

In the beta you could turn off the fog and extend the farplane past normal limits. Here's some screenshots from the beta. Notice the stepped terrain drawing and that when the artists get lazy the terrain looks *very* tiled.

http://www.killerrobots.com/pictures/wow...nshot1.jpg
http://www.killerrobots.com/pictures/wow...nshot2.jpg
http://www.killerrobots.com/pictures/wow...nshot3.jpg

After another look at WoW- you're right, there's no rotation or scattering of the texture maps, and you can see the "bathroom floor" effect on large pieces of terrain.
They did do a lot with blending between textures, though- it looks sort of like there is a large, low-resolution "texture map map" that gives the effect of painting blobs of textures here and there with a fuzzy brush. The page on detail textures was what I was looking for.

I know OpenGL doesn't deal with file formats, but what I meant was that it would put the object, vertex, normal, texture map, shader data all together in one place and in a format as close as possible to the code that would actually display it in a 3D game, to save trouble importing and translating.
The Monkey3D program (in development) I found on this board seems to have that idea in mind.

It looks like there's nothing exactly like what I was looking for in the first place (multitexturing preview tool) for the Mac, but I'll check out Rendermonkey...

OS X's developer tool comes with a tool called (I think) OpenGL Shader Builder. I'm not sure if it lets you load external models, but you can test and write shaders to work with the objects that it comes with. Also try the OpenGL Profiler; it's really awesome.

I'm not sure how advanced it is, because I generally just run my own shaders inside my game engine, but it's worth looking at because it's free and probably on your Mac already.