Book Image

3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug-in that enables the animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight is a great (and growing) RIA platform and games are the next level to exploit in it. But it doesn't offer 3D capabilities out of the box and integrating a 3D engine can involve lot of complex mathematics and matrix algebra. This book will help C# developers to get their fingers on the pulse of 3D in Silverlight. This book uses Balder, an open source 3D engine offering 3D capabilities for Silverlight 3. It leaves out boring matrix algebra and complex 3D mathematics. By the end of the book you will have explored the entire engine, and will be able to design and program your own 3D games with ease! The book begins by introducing you to the fundamental concepts of 2D games and then drives you into the 3D world, using easy-to-follow, step-by-step examples. The book employs amazing graphics and impressive performance, and increasingly adds more features to a 3D game giving you a rich interactive experience. By following the practical examples in this book, you will learn the important concepts, from the creation of the initial models, up to the addition of physics and artificial intelligence. The book helps you to provide realistic behaviors for 3D characters by enveloping models with different textures, using lights to create effects, animating multiple 3D characters using a physics engine (Farseer Physics Engine), and simulating real-life physics. Videos, music, and sounds associated with specific events offer the final touches to the 3D game development learning experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Pop quiz—Answers

Chapter 7. Using Effects and Textures to Amaze

In order to create realistic games, we must render scenes that project a genuine environment to the players. If we want to show a spaceship in a game, it will have to be similar to a real spaceship. Hence, we have to paint our models using textures and we must use different kinds of lights to illuminate them and to create amazing environments and effects. We must mix 2D images with 3D models. In this chapter, we will learn everything we need to know about the process of enveloping a 3D model using textures.

We will be able to take 3D elements from popular and professional 3D DCC tools and we will show them rendered in real-time on the screen with different textures, and enlightened by many lights. In this chapter, we shall:

  • Prepare the 3D elements to be enveloped by textures

  • Take advantage of 3D DCC tools to create 3D models with texture mapping coordinates

  • Understand how to work with many different complex textures

  • Control lights to give life to...