Frank Luna - Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 12

Introduction to
3D G AME P ROGRAMMING
WITH D IRECT X 12

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Introduction to
3D G AME P ROGRAMMING
WITH D IRECT X 12

Frank D. Luna

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Frank D. Luna. Introduction to 3D GAME PROGRAMMING WITH DIRECTX 12
ISBN: 978-1-942270-06-5

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To my nieces and nephews,
Marrick, Hans, Max, Anna, Augustus, Presley, and Elyse

C ONTENTS

I would like to thank Rod Lopez, Jim Leiterman, Hanley Leung, Rick Falck, Tybon Wu, Tuomas Sandroos, Eric Sandegren, Jay Tennant and William Goschnick for reviewing earlier editions of the book. I want to thank Tyler Drinkard for building some of the 3D models and textures used in some of the demo programs available on the books website. I also want to thank Dale E. La Force, Adam Hoult, Gary Simmons, James Lambers, and William Chin for their assistance in the past. In addition, I want to thank Matt Sandy for getting me on the DirectX 12 beta, and the rest of the DirectX team that helped answer questions for beta users. Finally, I want to thank the staff at Mercury Learning and Information, in particular, David Pallai, the publisher, and Jennifer Blaney, who guided the book through production.

Direct3D 12 is a rendering library for writing high-performance 3D graphics applications using modern graphics hardware on various Windows 10 platforms (Windows Desktop, Mobile, and Xbox One). Direct3D is a low-level library in the sense that its application programming interface (API) closely models the underlying graphics hardware it controls. The predominant consumer of Direct3D is the games industry, where higher level rendering engines are built on top of Direct3D. However, other industries need high performance interactive 3D graphics as well, such as medical and scientific visualization and architectural walkthrough. In addition, with every new PC being equipped with a modern graphics card, non-3D applications are beginning to take advantage of the GPU (graphics processing unit) to offload work to the graphics card for intensive calculations; this is known as general purpose GPU computing , and Direct3D provides the compute shader API for writing general purpose GPU programs. Although Direct3D 12 is usually programmed from native C++, the SharpDX team (http://sharpdx.org/) is working on .NET wrappers so that you can access this powerful 3D graphics API from managed applications.

This book presents an introduction to programming interactive computer graphics, with an emphasis on game development, using Direct3D 12. It teaches the fundamentals of Direct3D and shader programming, after which the reader will be prepared to go on and learn more advanced techniques. The book is divided into three main parts. Part I explains the mathematical tools that will be used throughout this book. Part II shows how to implement fundamental tasks in Direct3D, such as initialization; defining 3D geometry; setting up cameras; creating vertex, pixel, geometry, and compute shaders; lighting; texturing; blending; stenciling; and tessellation. Part III is largely about applying Direct3D to implement a variety of interesting techniques and special effects, such as working with animated character meshes, picking, environment mapping, normal mapping, real-time shadows, and ambient occlusion.

For the beginner, this book is best read front to back. The chapters have been organized so that the difficulty increases progressively with each chapter. In this way, there are no sudden jumps in complexity leaving the reader lost. In general, for a particular chapter, we will use the techniques and concepts previously developed. Therefore, it is important that you have mastered the material of a chapter before continuing. Experienced readers can pick the chapters of interest.