Justin Stenning - Direct3D Rendering Cookbook

Justin Stenning , a software enthusiast since DOS was king, has been working as a software engineer since he was 20. He has been the technical lead on a range of projects, from enterprise content management and software integrations to mobile apps, mapping, and biosecurity management systems. Justin has been involved in a number of open source projects, including capturing images from fullscreen Direct3D games and displaying in-game overlays, and enjoys giving a portion of his spare time to the open source community. Justin completed his Bachelor of Information Technology at Central Queensland University, Rockhampton. When not coding or gaming, he thinks about coding or gaming, or rides his motorbike. Justin lives with his awesome wife, and his cheeky and quirky children in Central Victoria, Australia.

To Lee, thanks for keeping things running smoothly using your special skill of getting stuff done and of course for your awesomeness. To the kids, yes, I will now be able to play more Minecraft and Terraria with you.

I would like to thank Michael for taking a punt on me all those years ago and mentoring me in the art of coding.

I would also like to thank the SharpDX open source project for producing a great interface to Direct3D from the managed code, and Blendswap.com and its contributors for providing such a great service to the Blender community.

Thank you to the reviewers who provided great feedback and suggestions throughout.

Lastly, a big thank you to James, Priya, Wendell, and all the folks at Packt Publishing who have made this book possible.

Julian Amann started working with DirectX 13 years ago, as a teenager. He received his master's degree in Computer Science from the Technische Universitt Mnchen (Germany) in 2011. He has worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Computer Graphics at Bauhaus-Universitt Weimar, where he did his research on image quality algorithms and has also been involved in teaching computer graphics. Currently, Julian works at the Chair of Computational Modeling and Simulation ( CMS ) at the Technische Universitt Mnchen. He is writing his PhD thesis about product data models for infrastructure projects in the field of Civil Engineering. In his spare time, Julian enjoys programming computer-graphics-related applications and blogging at vertexwahn.de.

Stephan Hodes has been working as a software engineer in the games industry for 15 years while GPUs made the transition from fixed function pipeline to a programmable shader hardware. During this time, he worked on a number of games released for PC as well as Xbox 360 and PS3.

Since he joined AMD as a Developer Relations Engineer in 2011, he has been working with a number of European developers on optimizing their technology to take full advantage of the processing power that the latest GPU hardware provides. He is currently living with his wife and son in Berlin, Germany.

Brian Klamik has worked as a software design engineer at Microsoft Corporation for 15 years. Nearly all of this time was spent evolving the Direct3D API in Windows by working together with the graphics hardware partners and industrys leading application developers. He enjoys educating developers about using Direct3D optimally, as well as enjoying the results of their labor.

Todd J. Seiler works in the CAD/CAM dental industry as a Graphics Software Engineer at E4D Technologies in Dallas, TX. He has worked as a Software Development Engineer in Test on Games for Windows LIVE at Microsoft, and he has also worked in the mobile game development industry. He has a B.S. in Computer Graphics and Interactive Media from the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, IA with a minor in Computer Information Systems. He also has a B.S. in Real-time Interactive Simulations from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA, with minors in Mathematics and Physics.

In his spare time, he plays video games, studies Catholic apologetics and theology, writes books and articles, and toys with new technology when he can. He periodically blogs about random things at http://www.toddseiler.com.

Chuck Walbourn , a software design engineer at Microsoft Corporation, has been working on games for the Windows platform since the early days of DirectX and Windows 95. He entered the gaming industry by starting his own development house during the mid-90s in Austin. He shipped several Windows titles for Interactive Magic and Electronic Arts, and he developed the content tools pipeline for Microsoft Game Studios Xbox titled as Voodoo Vince. Chuck worked for many years in the game developer relations groups at Microsoft, presenting at GDC, Gamefest, X-Fest, and other events. He was the lead developer on the DirectX SDK (June 2010) release. He currently works in the Xbox platform group at Microsoft, where he supports game developers working on the Microsoft platforms through the Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK blog, the DirectX Tool Kit and DirectXTex libraries on CodePlex, and other projects. Chuck holds a bachelors degree and a masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin.

Vinjn Zhang is an enthusiastic software engineer. His interest in programming includes game development, graphics shader writing, human-computer interaction, and computer vision. He has translated two technical books into Chinese, one for the processing language and other for OpenCV.