This is gonna be a very brief post on a pretty simple but powerful tool for any hobby programmers tinkering with Direct3D. One of the most annoying things, at least for me, was always having to manually create input layouts for each different vertex shader I used in my hobby projects. I have now restarted … Continue reading
This is the second part of my shadow mapping tutorial (find part 1 here). I am going to discuss some of the issues of the shadow mapping technique as well as some basic solutions to the problem. I’m also going to attach a demo application, in which you can play around with some of the … Continue reading
I’ve had some downtime lately and seeing as I wrote a basic shadow mapping demo, I figured I’d write a short tutorial on the theory and implementation of shadow mapping. Shadow mapping is one of those topics that tends to get explained in a overly complicated manner when in fact the concept is rather simple. … Continue reading
So for the first time in months, I find myself with some downtime. I’m currently in Arlington, TX visiting my dad. the last few days have been spent reading my silly fantasy novels and watching GDC lectures from previous years (thanks Dave!). I watched a presentation on NVIDIA’s NSight tool which allows for in-depth GPU … Continue reading
A lot of guys have asked me for advice on developing and debugging shader programs. Well, it’s a tricky topic to deal with. Tto be able to fully debug shader programs you will need either a shader IDE like FXComposer or a GPU debugging tool like Nvidia Nsight. These are both complex tools and beyond … Continue reading
I attended my first global game jam over the weekend and it was quite an experience… I learnt that trying to write a 2D game engine and a game in 48hrs is something I wont try again. I am not familiar with any game frameworks like XNA, game maker or game salad, so I was forced … Continue reading
This tutorial is going to cover the basics of using the geometry shader stage present in DX10+. The geometry stage is extremely useful for rendering sprites, billboards and particles systems. This is the first part of a three part series which will cover geometry shaders, billboards and particles systems. The Geometry Shader The geometry shader … Continue reading
I’ve been rather quiet of late, I made some rather large changes in the direction of my master’s thesis and have spent a lot of time on replanning and restructuring my work. I initially intended to do my thesis on real-time pathfinding in dynamic environments, this is still the case but I realised during my research that … Continue reading
This tutorial will deal with the basic scene lighting. It will cover the basic Phong and Blinn-Phong reflection models and the per-vertex (Gouraud) and per-pixel shading models (Phong). The Blinn-Phong reflection model is used in the openGL fixed-function pipeline (and as far as I know also used in DX9 but I’m not 100% sure). Modern … Continue reading
Normally I wouldn’t bother with post’s like this but this topic has really started to irritate me. I do a lot of reading, mainly game development and graphics books and the following statement comes up quite often in some form or another and it really really irritates me: The projection matrix flattens the 3D geometry … Continue reading
