Direct3D Shaderx

Shaders are the direction of real time graphics programming for games and other applications. They were introduced in their first versions with DX8 hardware like the GeForce3 and the Radeon 8500 and are continouisly extended in further version of hardware and software like in the new DX9 class of hardware.It is industry wide consensus that shaders are the way to get cool graphics in realtime games. But there has always been a lack of good documentation about what shaders are and their possibilities. This book was made to address it. It is designed to handle the DX8 API way of shaders together with lots of DX8 samples but the principles apply to OpenGL shader programming also. The book is splittet into two parts. The first part is a thorough introduction about vertex and pixel shaders written by editor Wolfgang Engel. It explains the reasoning behind the shaders, the definitions of the virtual machines, and all assembler commands available. For each type of shaders there is also an introductionary example section for getting first successful shader programs running. It is well written with lots of information. The second part is a collection of shader gems - short articles by differenct authors. Among the authors are people from developer relations from nVidia, Matrox and ATI as well as graphics programmers from inside the gaming industry. These authors have lots of experience programming shaders and they show in short sections what's possible and how to get there. This book is standing in my bookshelf and in the bookshelves of a lot of professional developers worldwide. I highly recommend buying it.

If you want to start shader programming or if you have still some experience in shader programming this book is for you.The stuff presented here is absolutely cutting-edge. I can't understand other reviewers, who complain about the usage of ps.1.4. All the upcoming graphics cards will support ps.1.4, so it is good to get some of the examples in ps.1.4.I heard that the first print of this book was sold out after one week ... I know why !

I found this book to be an excellent reference for state-of-the-art vertex and pixel shaders. It's well organized, and contains many useful solutions for game developers.

I read most of the chapters of this book so far and I must say this is the best book I have ever seen on effects programming. It was much easier for me to understand specific techniques by reading a real text instead of flipping through numerous power point slides. Although I have done some work with shaders before, I found Wolfgang's introduction at the beginning of the book very useful.One of my favourite chapters is Dean Calver's chapter "Vertex Decompression in a Shader". Using this technique is a must to save valuable memory bandwidth. I think this chapter alone is worth the money to buy the book. I can't name all the excellent articles here, but I want to highlight a few:Per-Pixel lighting for a skinned mesh is not trivial. You can find a great explanation of this in "Character Animation with Direct3D Vertex Shader" by David Gosselin. Additionally this article shows you how to combine keyframe animation with a skeleton based animation, which might be useful to combine an animated face (keyframe animation) with a skeleton based animation of the body (this seems to be used in a few upcoming games).Kim Pallister explains optimization techniques, that helps you to optimize your shaders so that they run on older hardware. This techiques are also useful on the newest hardware.Jason L. Mitchells chapter on Image processing gives you a lot of ground to think about post-processing shaders, which are useful to get a look like a 50's TV set or to get a heat signature. He shows numerous ways to influence the overall look and feel of your game by using filter, egde detection and mathematical morphollogy.One of the very handy tips is written by Steffen Bendel. He shows how to smooth fonts in a very simple and efficient way on pixel shader hardware. This is very useful for displaying fonts. You can implement this feature in minutes in your engine. Steffen's chapter "Smooth Lighting with ps.1.4" shows one of the most interesting ways to improve lighting quality in a game engine. Kenneth Hurley's chapter "Photorealistic Faces with Vertex and Pixel Shaders" shows step-by-step, how to prepare art in a way, that the result looks photorealistic and it explains each line in the source code needed to produce photo realistic faces with the help of vertex and pixel shaders in real-time. The article comes with the source of the necessary tools (diffuse cube map generator, a texture mapping cylindrical wrapper (MAX Plugin)) and an example program. Kenneth shows how to achieve this effect in 2 passes on multitexturing capable hardware by using sphere maps. Getting into the field of "Non-Photorealistic Rendering with Vertex and Pixel Shaders" is not trivial. Blockbusters like MotoGP, Wreckless, Cel Damage, Jet Set Radio Future show how non-photorealistic rendering can influence the atmosphere in a game. Jason L. Mitchell and Drew Card gives you a detailed explanation on how to do these kind of techniques in real-time.A collection of very useful "Texture Perturbation Ef

I have read just about every presentation, white paper, and web page there is on vertex and pixel shaders. Now I am kicking myself for having not just waited for this book to come out. It fills in all the gaps, and is full of tricks I never would have thought of on my own.