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Wolfgang F. Engel
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Direct3D SHADERX: Vertex & Pixel Shader Tips and Techniques (Wordware Game Developer's Library) Paperback – June 25, 1996

by Woldgang Engel (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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Focusing on Direct3D 8.x, this book shows a wide array of specialized vertex and pixel shader programming tricks from industry experts.
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  1. Print length
    500 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Wordware Publishing, Inc.
  4. Publication date
    June 25, 1996
  5. Dimensions
    7.48 x 1.47 x 9.28 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1556220413
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1556220418
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Wolfgang F. Engel has been addicted to game programming for more than 12 years. Since the early betas of DirectX 8, he has focused on vertex and pixel shader programming.He is the author of Beginning Direct3D Game Programming and two upcoming books on Direct3D, and conducts tutorials on Direct3D from all over the world.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wordware Publishing, Inc. (June 25, 1996)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 500 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1556220413
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1556220418
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.45 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.48 x 1.47 x 9.28 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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Wolfgang F. Engel

Wolfgang F. Engel

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Wolfgang is the CTO of The Forge Interactive. The Forge Interactive is a think-tank for advanced real-time graphics research and a service provider for the video game and movie industry. We worked in the last nearly 13 years on many AAA IPs like Tomb Raider, Battlefield 4, Murdered Soul Suspect, Star Citizen, Dirt 4, Vainglory, Transistor, Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Battlefield 1, Mafia 3, Call of Duty Warzone, Supergiant's Hades and others. Wolfgang is the founder and editor of the ShaderX and GPU Pro books series, a Microsoft MVP, the author of several books and articles on real-time rendering and a regular contributor to websites and the GDC. One of the books he edited -ShaderX4- won the Game developer Front line award in 2006. He is in the advisory boards of several companies. He is an active contributor to several future standards that drive the Game Industry. You can find him on twitter at

wolfgangengel

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
11 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Manchor Ko
4.0 out of 5 stars old but still relevant
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2007
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The best part of the book is the article by Dean Calver on vertex compression. Most of the other material are good practial tricks on shaders plus tutorials. Dean's article not only gives a clever way to compress and decompress vertex position - by concating the model view matrix with his decompression matrix. His use of eigen vectors to find the principal axis is refreshing. He also showed us how to extend the method to handle geometry that are larger and cannot be handled within the precision of the basic method.
One person found this helpful
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Joe Ludwig
2.0 out of 5 stars Very poorly organized
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2003
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This is a very poorly put together book. It's organized as a series of small articles, but the article sizes vary widely and many of them contradict others. ...
It definately has some useful information in there, but it's tough to extract through the poor organization and formatting.
3 people found this helpful
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William McColl
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2015
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great book
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Thomas Jörg
5.0 out of 5 stars Shader at its Best
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2002
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 Effects" is shown by John Isidoro, Guennadi Riguer, and Chris Brennan from ATI. They show how to produce clouds, fire, and glass in a very efficient way in the pixel shader.
The chapters on "Rendering Ocean Water", "Rippling Reflective and Refractive Water", "Chrystal/Candy Shader" and "Bubble Shader" show some of the neat tricks used in the ATI nature demo. The example programs didn't make it into the book, but you can get them with source now from the ATI web-site.
Another one of my favourite articles is the one written by Philippe Beaudoin and Juan Guardado "A Non-Integer Power Function on the Pixel Shader". This article deals with the lack of color precision on first generation shader hardware. It shows a way how to overcome this problem by using a cool algorithm.
Ádám Moravánszky shows how to use bump maps together with BRDF rendering. If you ever thought about implementing this technique, you can see why Ádám is one of the shader wizards.
Using 3D textures to store data for games is a technique that is getting more and more common with newer hardware. Evan Hart shows how to use 3D textures in an efficient way in games.
Martin Kraus is a member of the Visualization and Interactive Systems Group at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. This group developed a bunch of new techniques in volume graphics. He shows some very nice examples on what you can do with 3D textures on current hardware. It is interesting to read about their advanded techniques to use 3D textures very efficiently.
It is not a trivial task to design an efficient graphics engine, that uses shaders to show breath-taking visuals. Ingo Frick the technical director of Massive Development explains in "Visualization with the Krass Engine", how they designed the Krass engine to get an efficient shader implementation. This engine is used in several upcoming european game titles (Aquanox Revelation, Spellforce et all.).
The last chapter by Bart Sekura shows, how to build up a complete shader driven graphics engine, that is capable to read in Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein levels and to display them. You can find the full source with a thorough explanation in this book.
I would like to recommend this book to everyone, who is interested in real-time graphics programming...
18 people found this helpful
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Sebb
4.0 out of 5 stars Direct3D ShaderX FOR RADEON 8500 !!
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2002
I am french and I could not find Direct3D ShaderX on Amazon.fr, so I went on Amazon.com and I was very excited to receive my Direct3D ShaderX book ! I received it yesterday and began to read it. It is a pretty good book even if all chapters have not the same quality and number of explainations. But there is something that is upsetting me: this book is essentially for ATI RADEON 8500 developpers ! Because near all pixel shaders are written for ps1.4, only supported by the ATI card !... and I have a GeForce 3 ti so, even if several articles give me some idea, I cannot use the code because my card does not support ps1.4...
For vertex shader, no problem because everbody support vs1.0.
So, for a ATI Radeon 8500 user, I would rate this book 5 stars ! But for a nVidia GeForce 3/4 user, I would rate this book only 3 stars...
I would like a book like this one written by nVidia engineers and updated to Cg langage, it would be great !! (:D)
Sorry for my poor english.
Sebb
6 people found this helpful
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Eran Kampf
2.0 out of 5 stars VERY disappointing ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2002
When I purchased this book I didn't have any high expectations about the introductory chapter or the vertex shaders chapter but I was really looking forward for the Pixel shaders part and last chapter about engine design.
To my disappointment, the book has some serious flaws:
1. Nearly all the pixel shader stuff is written for ps1.4 which is only supported by the Radeon8500. Being a GF3 owner, this is very disturbing ....
2. The engine design chapters turned out to be 3 very short articles that contain general discussion without getting into engine implementation details.
3. The chapter about developing with Shader Studio is totally useless. This information should be in the program's manual and not in the book...
4. Some of the articles are written in a "Here's the shader code... go figure it out" style...
5. A major portion of the material in this book could be easily found online by going to NVIDIA's or ATI's site and going through the papers and presentations, or reading the stuff in the DirectX SDK, or just using google in the "worst" case where non of the above sources was helpful.
6. Lack of common code standard. Some articles use NVIDIA's assembler, some use MS's assembler and some use the DirectX's effects framework.
To conclude, this book was a major disappointment to me ...
13 people found this helpful
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