Learn DirectX 11
The sole purpose of this project is learning DirectX 11 api. Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 book is used as the main source of knowledge. The second part of the book is composed of various rendering techniques and examples. Most of these examples will be implemented in the project (from very basic up to some advanced techniques). The implementation process follows the structure of the book.
##Chapter 8. Mesh Rendering
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The example is pretty simple but it is a good point to start implementing more sophisticated techniques. There are a cube and directional light source on the scene.
The main goals are:
- Initialize DirectX device, context and swap chain.
- Load geometry and texture data and upload the data into the GPU.
- Load and compile vertex and pixel shaders.
- Set up the pipeline and draw the scene.
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The example uses famous Bob Lamp model which has 1 animation. Also there is a directional light source on the scene. |
Vertices of such animated model has the following format: position, normal, texture coordinates, 4 bone indices and 4 bone weights. Vertex shader gets appropriate bones' matrices from StructuredBuffer<float4x4> by bone indices and uses bone weights to interpolate the outcome vertex position.
Actually the vertex shader is pretty simple. The main challenge is to load a model with its animations, compose vertex data (including bone indices and weights) and implement animation algorithm which computes bone matrices for each frame preserving bone hierarchy.
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| The original example from the book processes an animated mesh. Vertex shader does vertex skinning and then tessellation shaders tessellate skinned vertices (control points). The implementation skips vertex skinning part (see previous example). | |
| There are no vertex and index buffers. Vertex shader creates 2 triangles which form a quad and passes 2 patches (3 control points each) to the hull shader. Hull shader conveys control points’ attributes and selects the maximum inner/outer tessellation factors. There are no any smart LOD-based decisions made (naive implementation). Domain shader gets patches, samples the displacement map and emits new vertices. In addition a normal map is used to lit the displaced surface properly. |