Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix A. Adding
the
Third
Dimension
In the previous chapters you have been working on a 2D game, and DirectXTK hides
away a lot of the complexity of making a 2D game in a 3D world. Most big-budget
modern games make use of 3D instead of 2D for most of the action, to create immers-
ive experiences that in many cases try to look as realistic as possible.
3D itself is not much more complicated than working in 2D; however, because we're
working with Direct3D directly now, there is some extra complexity and concepts that
you need to learn to understand how everything fits together.
In this appendix we're going to take a crash course in 3D rendering by looking at the
different concepts involved, from vertices to shaders, and how they all fit together to
put a 3D object on the screen.
We will cover the following topics:
• Vertices and triangles
• Indices
• 3D cameras
• DirectXMath
• Buffers
• Shaders (vertex and pixel)
• Input layouts
• Drawing the model
If you've skipped back to this section and aren't familiar with the Direct3D pipeline and
how to set it up, be sure to go back and read
Chapter 1
,
Getting Started with Direc-
t3D
, before you continue.
Vertices and triangles
All 3D models consist of a collection of points in space called
vertices
. These vertices
(singular: vertex) define the shape of the model when combined. Each vertex is a co-
