Is there anyway to get around the 8 light maximum limitation of OpenGL?
sorry, but thats, like the name says, a LIMITATION. try to get a (maybe) software implementation of opengl, where the lightcalculus is supporting X lights (i thing the drivers for the geforce quadro can handle up to 24 lights), but when your implementation says 8 lights, it does support eight lights only.
ok, now i try to be constructionally. you can render your scene with 8 lights. then setup opengl with further 8 lights and render your scene adding to the first pass. so you could use up to 16 lights. but it would drop your framerate under 50% of the original one. furthermore you could calculate the rest of lights by your own. the opengl lighting formulas can be read in any opengl reference.
regards,
jan
More importantly, the limitation specified 8 lights per primitive. It is very rare that you will actually need to have more than 8 separate lights operation over a single polygon or object. So, you can split your scene up by how many lights are in use over each object.
In any case, you probably can’t distinguish between more than 4-5 lights on one object.