I think it may be helpful to have the ability to define in a single location the material diffuse/specilar/etc. properties along with the diffuse, normal maps and so on for a single ‘material’ and have the polygon entries in the .egg files simply refer to this. This way it would be easy to make a material ‘library’ for a game with the usual bricks, glass and such and then simply refer to this in the model (being set by the modeler while building a level).
I’ve used Ogre a lot before so I guess this is why I look for such a feature in Panda3D, but I guess there might be a different way to approach such a case here. I’ve thought about using the ’ { filename }’ line in a .egg file to ‘import’ a library of textures and materials and just reference these in the polygons, which seems pretty close.
As it stands, one has to specify the diffuse, specular and such for each model one makes in a level editor, which is pretty tedious. As I mentioned before though, I may have missed out on a simple way to do this in Panda 3D - if so, do let me know!
Thanks for your help!