Aye, but sometimes it's better to waste memory, than to add some conditional logic (if I understood you correctly). Anyway, are you experimenting a bit with shaders here?
The way modelers would like it would be probably if they did not have to bother at all unless they specificaly wanted the stuff.
I've got little idea how to correctly work in HLSL (all my previous efforts were always in GLSL, though the idea is really the same), however there's no rocket science here. Fallout needs just good phong lighting imitation and several additional effects like stealth boy invisibility (which would be fairly simple).
I'm sure I can just get something ready, so that people who can do nice stuff can play with it already and be prepared whhen it recieves full support by engine (by that I mean required variables sent by application and read from files, so that artists can choose their own parameters where required).
I think it'd be the most interesting on texture where all efforts to keep it similar to sprites failed ( like metal armors ).
IMO, this looks horrible. It's better to see 3D model nice detailed than this sprite:( It's not orginal sprite and it's not good.
Models are fairly detailed, though for example VB had better detailed heads (might post some comparion), this is fairly enough to look great at 1:1 zoom. It's somewhat unfair to compare low-poly vertex-shaded models to original sprites rendered by at the time slow methods. However since we can afford those methods on fairly arbitary hardware nowdays, it's just matter of time and effort to make it look good enough for everyone.
