DirectX 11 has been around for a couple of years now but never received much attention from 3D developers up until now. With PC regaining its popularity in the gaming community and the third generation of Xbox gaming console just around the corner, the transition to DirectX 11 is just a matter of time.
In this book, we will cover common and new 3D techniques implemented using the features offered by DirectX 11. From basic lighting to advanced screen space effects, each recipe will introduce you to one or more new DirectX 11 features such as Compute Shaders, Unordered Access Views, and Tessellation.
The HLSL Development Cookbook will provide you with a series of essential recipes to help you make the most out of the different rendering techniques used within games and simulations using the DirectX 11 API.
Chapter 1, Forward Lighting, will guide you through the light equation for the most commonly used light sources implemented in the forward lighting technique.
Chapter 2, Deferred Shading, will teach you to optimize the lighting calculations introduced in the previous chapter by separating the light calculations from the scene complexity.
Chapter 3, Shadow Mapping, will help you to improve the realism of the lighting calculations covered in the previous chapters by adding shadow support.
Chapter 4, Postprocessing, will guide you to enhance the quality of the lighting results with different 2D filtering techniques.
Chapter 5, Screen Space Effects, will help you to extend the lighting calculations from Chapter 2, Deferred Lighting, by implementing additional lighting effects as screen space calculations.
Chapter 6, Environment Effects, will help you to add some final touches to your rendered scene by changing the weather and adding some interactivity.
Running the samples provided with this book requires a computer with a DirectX 11-enabled graphics card running Windows Vista or newer operating system. Compiling the code will require Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 or newer with DirectX SDK (June 2010).
If you have some basic Direct3D knowledge and want to give your work some additional visual impact by utilizing the advanced rendering techniques, then this book is for you. It is also ideal for those seeking to make the transition from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11 and those who want to implement powerful shaders with the HLSL.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: “Once the constant buffer is updated, bind it to the pixel shader using the context function PSSetConstantBuffers.”
A block of code is set as follows:
cbuffer HemiConstants : register( b0 )
{
float3 AmbientDown : packoffset( c0 );
float3 AmbientRange : packoffset( c1 );
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: “Where α is the angle between N and L”.
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