Building a custom material using advanced lighting

The preceding Building a custom material recipe went into the details of creating a custom material that uses our own vertex and pixel shaders. In this recipe, we will build upon that work and add in advanced lighting and shadows.

Getting ready

We will be making TorqueScript changes in a project based on the Torque 3D Full template, and try them out using the Empty Terrain level. If you haven't already, use the Torque Project Manager (Project Manager.exe) to create a new project from the Full template. It will be found under the My Projects directory. Then start up your favorite script editor, such as Torsion, and let's get going!

How to do it...

In the following steps, we will be replacing the soldier's standard material with a custom material that blends the sky cube map on to polygons that are angled away from the camera. The scene's lighting will also be taken into account.

1. Create a new shaders/common/packt directory.

2. Place the following vertex...