Guys, seriously... I have no IDEA what I am talking about!
Sybixsus, the whole point of the effect I am thinking of (we'll call it texture shaders, for now... I think Marc might be right about the name...) is that you apply it to a model to get rid of seams that, for whatever reason (usually having to do with a model's format, or texture application issues) you CAN'T really eliminate using smoothing groups. So you apply this effect to make it LOOK like there are no seems, even though there are, technically.
I think Marc is the closest to what I was talking about. I'll take a look at Halo's examples. But if normal-mapping will eliminate seems without regard to smoothing groups, I'll probably just do it that way, since I want to use normal mapping in all my games anyway.
Sybixsus, the whole point of the effect I am thinking of (we'll call it texture shaders, for now... I think Marc might be right about the name...) is that you apply it to a model to get rid of seams that, for whatever reason (usually having to do with a model's format, or texture application issues) you CAN'T really eliminate using smoothing groups. So you apply this effect to make it LOOK like there are no seems, even though there are, technically.
I think Marc is the closest to what I was talking about. I'll take a look at Halo's examples. But if normal-mapping will eliminate seems without regard to smoothing groups, I'll probably just do it that way, since I want to use normal mapping in all my games anyway.