After much effort, I have maged to get a shader from ATI's RenderMonkey ported to T3D. I had to do extensive research and work not in porting the shader, but in suppling the correct information from the T3D material system to the Shader. I am talking about registers, samplers, view matrices, light direction vectors, etc. This was the subject of a Tutorial I created on the subject, and I will probably create some more, since I found the documentation on this subject quite lacking.

I chose RenderMonkey as a shader generation tool because unlike Nvidia's FX Composer, RenderMonkey generates a separate Vertex and Pixel shader file, something required for the T3D. This makes it much easier to port a shader than one of FxComposers .FX files (although porting FX Composer  generated shaders can be done).

The shader itself is nothing special, it is a simple "glitter" shader I found in the RenderMonkey examples directory. The effect is difficult to see on the video below, but it basically creates bright spots of of white on the mesh which twinkle as the view position changes. This simple implementation, however, should allow me to port over other shaders much more easily.

I have gone from knowing very little about shaders and T3d's material system to having quite a good grounding in it in about a week, due to the amount of effort this took to do, which I suppose means it was worth it, despite the time delay it caused.