Review of Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX (Premier Press Game Development (Software)) (Paperback)

I picked this book up about a year ago as it seemed to start from the beginning and cover much ground.Little did I know at the time that this would be the best book I'd find on the topic a year later.The coverage on shadow volumes and shadow maps is impressive.The discussion of things such as the depth buffer and stencil buffers is good.Plus having access to the various vertex and pixel shaders code made it easy to learn from just reviewing the code.

Outside of the SDK, this is the only D3D book that I continue to reference, even as I move to DirectX 9.

Product Description
There are many books that describe the theory behindrendering techniques without walking the reader through actual sourcecode. There are also samples available on the internet that supplysource code without explaining how and why the code works. There arevery few resources available that walk the reader all the way from thetheory to the implementation details. Real Time Rendering Tricks andTechniques in DirectX bridges that gap by presenting over 25 renderingtechniques using the latest version of DirectX. The book begins withbasic concepts like matrices, vertices, and textures before moving toadvanced topics such as vertex and pixel shaders.

Most of the rendering techniques are based on vertex and pixel shaders.

Included are three different techniques for generating shadows,reflection and refraction, Bezier surfaces, matrix palette skinning,bump mapping, image processing, and much more. There are also severaltechniques which are not based on shaders. There are chapters thatcover using the stencil buffer, video textures with DirectShow,picking, timing, 2D drawing, and drawing text efficiently. Eachchapter presents the theory behind the technique before walking thereader through the shader and application code that makes eachtechnique possible. Each chapter ends with a short discussion ofperformance considerations, limitations, and ideas forimprovements. After studying a given technique, the reader willunderstand what the technique is, why it works, and how it works.

The CD includes several tools, as well as all of the application code,shader code, and media needed to implement the techniques. It alsoincludes sample applications and technology papers from nVidia andATI. As readers understand each technique, they can go to these thirdparty resources to see how other people have approached similarproblems. The book and CD give the reader a well rounded view of theseexciting rendering tricks and techniques.

About the Author
Since 1995, Kelly Dempski has been a researcer at Accenture's Technology Labs working in the areas of multimedia, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Interactive TV, with a strong focus on photo-realistic rendering and interactive techniques.He has authored several papers and has had a project included in the Smithsonian's permanent collection on Information Technology. In addition to his research work, Kelly has taught Java, developed rendering engines, and dabbled in image processing and compression. Kelly is the author of "Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX" from Premier Press (March 2002).

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