Tag directx

DirectX10 Tutorial 9: The Geometry Shader

Bobby 21 Comments

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 stage was introduced in DX10 and people initially assumed that it would be useful for tessellation purpose (which is true) but it’s more useful for use with particles systems and sprite rendering. The geometry stage sits between the vertex and pixel shader stages and its primary use is creating new primitives from existing ones.

Just to recap, vertices are sent to the vertex shader within a vertex buffer that is stored on the GPU.  A draw call issued to the API, sends a vertex buffer down the pipeline.  Each vertex first enters the vertex shader where it is transformed as necessary, and its vertex data is modified (if necessary). Once vertices have been processed and outputted by the vertex shader, they get combined into primitives during the primitive setup stage of the API. The type of primitive created from the vertices sent through the vertex buffer depends on the primitive topology set (points, lines and triangles).  Normally, once a primitive is constructed, it moves on to the screen mapping and fragment generation (convert triangle to pixels) stages before reaching the pixel shader stage and finally being drawn to the screen. Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 9: The Geometry Shader” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 7: Viewports

Bobby 11 Comments

This is going to be a very brief tutorial; the idea for it came about from a comment on my very first tutorial about using multiple viewports. I assumed that using multiple viewports would be a simple matter of just calling a SetViewport method just like in DX9, but it isn’t. I tried finding some info online but there is absolutely nothing available so I had to figure it out on my own. There are two methods to get multiple viewports working. The first requires a state change when selecting the viewports but I don’t think that the cost of that is too prohibitive since you would probably only swap viewports once per viewport during the scene rendering. The second method involves using a geometry shader to specify which viewport to use during the clipping/screen mapping stage in the pipeline.

What is a viewport

Well lets first discuss what a viewport actually is, if you Google a bit you’ll find almost no information regarding viewports or what they actually are (and there is absolutely no info in the DX documentation). A viewport is a rectangle that defines the area of the frame buffer that you are rendering to. Viewports do have depth values which affect the projected z range of any primitives in the viewport but this is only used in very advanced cases so you should always set the near depth to 0 and the far depth to 1. If we imagine a car game in which we have a rear view mirror, a simple method to draw the rear view mirror contents is to set the viewport to the mirror area, rotate the camera to face backwards and render the scene. Another common use in games is when you see another player’s viewpoint within your HUD (Ghost recon does this quite often), once again to render this all that is require is to set the viewport to the area of your final image you want to render to, then you render the scene from the other players viewpoint. Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 7: Viewports” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 6: Blending and Alpha Blending

Bobby 17 Comments

It’s been ages since my last DirectX 10 tutorial and I apologize, I’ve been buried under a ton of work and haven’t had much free time lately. This is going to be a very short tutorial on pretty much the final stage in the rendering pipeline: color blending. If you recall, each frame displayed on the screen is simply a bitmap that gets displayed and updated multiple times a second. This bitmap is called the frame buffer, now the frame buffer is technically the image we see at any given point and the back buffer (assuming you are double buffering) is what you actually draw to (referred to as your render target) and only once you finish drawing do you display the back buffer to the screen by swapping the frame buffer and the back buffer by using the Present member of the DX10 swapchain class.

Now think back to the depth testing tutorial where we displayed that cube and had to enable depth testing for it to render properly. Now a  cube is made up of 6 sides with 2 faces per side, so that is 12 triangles we have to draw for each cube. The graphical API draws one triangle at a time to the back buffer, and used the depth buffer to check whether it can overwrite a pixel in the back buffer if the new pixel to be drawn is in front of it. If this test passes then the API is given permission to overwrite that pixel’s value but its not as simple as that! Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 6: Blending and Alpha Blending” →

3D DirectX10 Free Look Camera (Timer based)

Bobby 12 Comments

Introduction:

Okay so I promised I’d write a tutorial on writing a simple free look vector based camera, this tutorial doesn’t only apply to DirectX10 but to  pretty much any graphics API. We want to keep things simple initially so the simplest possible camera we can implement short of a first person style camera is a free look camera (without roll) so basically only two degrees of freedom: left/right and up/down, we are also going to implement some basic movement controls forwards/backwards and Strafe Left/Right. Continue reading “3D DirectX10 Free Look Camera (Timer based)” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 5: Basic Meshes

Bobby 20 Comments

Since my car has been broken for the last two days, I’ve taken off work and have been working on my Masters degree, since part of my Masters involves building a small “game engine” for AI testing, I’ve been doing some more DX10 work, so its convenient for me to quickly slap together a few more tutorials.

I covered the basics of indexed buffers and the depth testing in the last tutorial, in this short tut, I’m going to cover the basics of directX meshes. A mesh is a data structure that contains all the vertex and index buffers needed to draw an object. It’s a neater method of drawing objects as we’ll see. Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 5: Basic Meshes” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 4: Indexed Buffers and Depth Testing

Bobby 3 Comments

Okay so it’s been a while since my last tutorial, and I apologize for that. We dealt with textures in the last tutorial, and many of you might be wondering while I handled that so early? Well mainly because D3D 10 isn’t exactly an API designed for beginners, so a critical feature required for any scene rendering (depth testing or z-buffering) is done in D3D by use of a depth stencil texture, covering textures before depth testing makes sense in this case. Remember guys I’m not going to spoon feed you, these tutorials expect you to read the SDK docs for details on the variable types and the methods, these tutorials are just to give you a running start.

Before I get to Depth Testing, let’s draw something a little more complicated that a quad, how about a cube. Using the same method as in tutorial 3 the code to draw a six sided cube is as follows: Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 4: Indexed Buffers and Depth Testing” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 3: Textures

Bobby 16 Comments

So it’s been sometime since the last tutorial and I apologize for that, I’ve been busy wrapping up my exams for my second degree and finishing off a mini thesis for one of my subjects. So now that it’s all over with I‘ve sat down and done a small tutorial on dx10 texturing.

A lot of other tutorials leave texturing for later on in the tutorial but I’m going to do it now because it’s so simple and further illustrates the point of shader programs and what role they play. Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 3: Textures” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 2: Basic Primitive Rendering

Bobby 8 Comments

Okay I managed to find some time and wrote a very basic second tutorial that introduces the main concepts behind primitive rendering in DX10. This tutorial builds upon the base code of tutorial 1 so check that out if you haven’t already.

Also I need to mention that I’m not writing these tutorials for complete beginners, I expect you to at least have a very basic understanding of graphics programming and some of the terminology involved. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail regarding terms like culling, rasterizing, fragments etc.

One last aside before the tutorial, what makes DX10 different to DX and openGL is the removal of the fixed function pipeline. Now what the hell does that all mean? Well in directx9 and openGL, they had default ways of handling vertices, colors, texture co-ordinates etc. You’d pass through a vertex and a color and it would know what to do. It also handled lighting and other effects. In DX10 these defaults were removed and the core API has been simplified and reduced, this allows you to have full control over each pipeline stage and removes any past limitations present on things like the number of light sources and so on, but it has a tiny downside, the code complexity has increased a little.

If we take basic lighting for example, in the past a hobbyist could enable lighting with a few simple function calls and would get a satisfactory result and call it a day. Now for the same effect, the hobbyist would have to write all the pixel and vertex shaders necessary and make use of the phong (or other) reflection model equations to manually calculate the effect of lighting on the scene. Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 2: Basic Primitive Rendering” →

DirectX10 Tutorial 1: Setting up the D3D10 device

Bobby 43 Comments

So if you read my review of Wendy Jones’ book, you know my feelings on the state of DX10 tutorials and books, I want to try and maybe help some people out with tutorials in getting started with DX10, I am by no means an expert and the tutorials will basically cover everything that I’ve learnt so far. They will not be rehashes of the SDK tutorials nor Wendy Jones’ book. I’m hoping to slowly build up a dxManager wrapper class that can be easily used for some basic D3D apps. So let’s get started with the most basic topic: setting up the D3D device for drawing.

Note: The DX10 SDK tutorials are excellent, they are a must read and my early tutorials will be a concatenation of the information found in them! Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 1: Setting up the D3D10 device” →

Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming By Wendy Jones – Review

Bobby 23 Comments

A search of amazon.com in regards to directx10 books yields only three entries: Wendy Jones’ book, a book by peter Walsh which by all account is just a basic update of his previous directx9 book and recently a new book by frank luna which also seems just like an update of a previous book.

I purchased Wendy Jones’ book: Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming in January of this year and have only recently had the time to sit and go through it. In brief I wasn’t very impressed. This book is nothing more than a rehash of the tutorials available in the DX10 sdk, and to make matters worse you would think that she’d make an effort to improve upon the tutorials, that there would perhaps be more depth and clarity,  unfortunately she doesn’t. Continue reading “Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming By Wendy Jones – Review” →