13 replies to this topic

[Nanook]

I'm looking for some good resources / books on learning directx..

I've made a fixed pipeline opengl renderer earlier, but I've never implemented shaders before. I have read most of Real-Time Rendering (Möller, Haines and Hoffman) so I've got some theory..

I'm also planning to buy the CG shader tutorial book, but I'm after a book or a good resource on how directx works.. I'm working my way through the directx 11 sdk tutorials now..

[iedoc]

www.rastertek.com

www.braynzarsoft.net

www.directxtutorial.com

Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10

Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11

msdn is a good place to look too, they have tutorials for getting everything set up and stuff

[turch]

http://legalizeadult...phics-pipeline/

is invaluable
(credit to legalize)

www.directxtutorials.com

should be www.directxtutorial.com

[Jason Z]

You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

[Dave Eberly]

You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

You need to buy this book. It is really good...

[XVincentX]

You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

You need to buy this book. It is really good...

I have the book; i think it's useless for beginners.

[Jason Z]

You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

You need to buy this book. It is really good...

I have the book; i think it's useless for beginners.

Wow - I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like it. Can you elaborate on what didn't think was good about it? I thought that the discussion of the pipeline in Chapter 3 would be exactly what a beginner would want - its almost 100 pages that describes precisely what the pipeline does. This is targetted at people that haven't spent lots of time with the API already, so I am surprised that you don't think it is suitable for beginners...

Even so, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I would really like to hear your feedback though - that is the only way to improve in such cases!

[iedoc]

You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

You need to buy this book. It is really good...

I have the book; i think it's useless for beginners.

Wow - I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like it. Can you elaborate on what didn't think was good about it? I thought that the discussion of the pipeline in Chapter 3 would be exactly what a beginner would want - its almost 100 pages that describes precisely what the pipeline does. This is targetted at people that haven't spent lots of time with the API already, so I am surprised that you don't think it is suitable for beginners...

Even so, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I would really like to hear your feedback though - that is the only way to improve in such cases!

I just want to say that was a very positive reply to that comment. Too many people overlook the chance to get some productive criticism. I haven't read your book personally, but just for the fact that you say there is such a detailed explanation of the pipeline makes me think the book probably stands out from most other books briefly covering topics like the pipeline. All I can say is it would have been REAL nice if there was a detailed book about directx when i started learning

[XVincentX]

Hello!
At first i am sorry for the short comment, i realized it's useless if not well explained.
I did not say i do not like your book, i just said that is (in my opinion) quite useless for beginners.
I think this book is best suitable for middle-knowledged D3D programmer.

The pipeline is explored with great detail (i learned some useful things from it), and works great for a beginner (even if i think that Tesselation shader stages are explained in the "standard way", and so very difficult to understand).
But the entire second part of the book (Mesh Rendering and so on) jumps directly to concepts and tasks extremely difficult for a beginner. Displacement Mapping? Vertex Skinning (very bad explained, in my opinion)? Dynamic Tessellation? Deferred Rendering?

The best way to start is Documentation and the Beginning DirectX series, in my opinion.


P.S.
Since i'm not a very good english writer, i just copied this text from amazon page of your book, where a guy gave a review that express very better what is in my brain.

"the material presented is accurate and well written, but it fails on too many fronts to be considered great. The first half of the book is dedicated to explaining the Direct3D 11 Pipeline or at least it tries to. What you get is ultimately a regurgitation of the freely available DX documentation. The authors do little to actually explain the behind the scenes workings and I have a feeling if it is your first foray into DX you will be quickly lost. The one bit of explanation they routinely throw at you is through the use of images to explain concepts. This sounds excellent until you realize what it really means. You get images like a cube with six exploded sides demonstrating a cube map (which is sadly one of the better images) and my personal favorite, an image of a sphere in three different positions to demonstrate translations. This examples may sound petty, but if you read this book you will constantly roll your eyes at the ridiculousness of these listings. Code listings for the book's first half are no better. They are literally ripped from Microsoft's documentation and dumped on the page in an unremarkable matter.

The book improves in it's second half with more concrete examples of the concepts. They are actually interesting reads and very well explained compared to the first half. Unfortunately, here is where the book's biggest problem comes in. The authors have elected to use Jason Zink's Hieroglyph 3 engine as the basis for all of their examples. While I'm certain Mr. Zink's engine is of a high quality, it is a huge mistake. The justification for it's use is so we as readers are not bogged down in minutia when it comes to initializing Direct3D and Win32. In practice, it fails to allow us experience in initializing Direct3D. This is a fairly important component of using the API and it's dismissal is absurd. You will be forced to return to the documentation of the DXSDK in order to find anything of use, unless you want to be locked into the Hieroglyph engine. The biggest problem with authors using their own engines is in the changes that occur over time. Including raw DX and Win32 code allows future use even through subsequent DXSDK changes with a minimal of rewriting. The Hieroglyph engine is already changing from the version when the book was published just a few short months ago. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the books appendix stating that the Boost libraries are required for building the engine. On the engines homepage, this dependency has already been removed. This isn't a big deal for now, but does speak to the rate at which libraries tend to change overtime. It is entirely possible in the future the engine will have changed so much it's usefulness will suffer. Because of the use of the Hieroglpyh engine, all of the examples focus on shader code and leave everything else up to the engine itself. This is not particularly useful when you want to learn how to code in D3D11 from the ground up.

While the authors have presented a few useful chapters, the book fails to deliver consistently. If you are looking for anything other than a few shader code examples of trendy topics, you will have to look elsewhere. I recommend picking up Frank D. Luna's Direct3D 10 book to learn the fundamentals of DX programming. Afterward the Direct3D 11 documentation will be more than sufficient at highlighting the differences in the older and newer APIs. If you want the examples this book offers, I would suggest a GPU pro or ShaderX book as they are considerably heavier on content and will provide many more examples than this book provides. Again, it is not a bad book and if I were looking for strict documentation this would be high on my list. It's weakness however is in striking a balance between documentation like theory and cohesive examples of implementation."

"This book is too difficult for beginners and useless for advance users (you won't really learn something new)."

[turch]

Wow - I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like it. Can you elaborate on what didn't think was good about it? I thought that the discussion of the pipeline in Chapter 3 would be exactly what a beginner would want - its almost 100 pages that describes precisely what the pipeline does. This is targetted at people that haven't spent lots of time with the API already, so I am surprised that you don't think it is suitable for beginners...

Even so, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I would really like to hear your feedback though - that is the only way to improve in such cases!

I don't have the book but it looks like something I'm going to pick up soon. However - and this is pure speculation from looking at the contents - I'd say it doesn't look good for beginners. Beginner books have chapters like "Introduction to C++" and "Drawing Your First Triangle", organized more like a collection of tutorials. Your book looks like it would be great for experienced programmers starting to use DX11, going through each topic in detail.

[Jason Z]

I can certainly agree with the fact that the book doesn't provide an introduction to C++ / basic computer graphics, although I think including many entry level concepts would water down the content a little too much, and never bringing any of them to a mature level might be confusing too. I tried to write the book that I would have wanted when I started out, but I suppose that concept means different things to different people.

Still I will take the critique - I can always plan for updates on a second edition sometime down the road +1 for each of the feedback posts!

[Burnt_Fyr]

Don't have it yet, but it is on my list along with Game Engine Architecture by Gregory. I had read that amazon quote as well, and the part that stood out the most was the changes made to the code post publishing. Has a snapshot been made of the heiroglyph project at the time of the books publishing? perhaps that link should feature most prominantly on the site. I definately think a book like this will help my progression from x9 to x11, and the bump from Eberly is a good sign too.

Not to hijack but I find Dave has an understanding of these things(as you do as well) that is light years ahead of mine, and I've found his books to be over my head at times. To be fair though, It's been a while since I picked up my copy of 3DGEA, and I've definitly grown leaps and bounds by then, so maybe it's time to have another kick at the cat.

I just wish these tombs weren't so damned expensive... I've probably dropped more on Game Programming literature to date than I spent on my guitar

[Jason Z]

I also saw that review a little while back, and have thought about how best to handle the topic. I think utilizing the 3D engine to build the samples is the best way to keep the code relevant and continue to support it. Typically people complain about the opposite problem - that the code is dumped by the author and never touched again. In our case, I have found and fixed several fairly large bugs in the sample code, and have also made general efficiency improvements to the way that some mechanisms in the engine work.

The second half of the book (where the sample algorithms are described) is careful to describe the algorithms and the shader code, but not to discuss the engine mechanisms for carrying out those algorithms. This is an explicit choice, and was done to allow general improvements to be made while keeping the code in sync with the book. That review complained that I had removed the boost dependency - but that is a good thing! There was no functional difference in the samples, but there was about 70 mb less dependency... The code is being updated, but not updated without consideration of the book.

In addition, other samples are added to the code base that show topics that aren't covered in the book. For example, I have recently added an MFC sample that shows how to interact with D3D11 and MFC, and also added a Kinect sample. There is lots of things that can't fit into a book, but are still worth conveying to your audience. In this case I think if we didn't update the code, then people would complain in 1-2 years that the code was getting stale and out of date... I would take a functional reference over a static snapshot any day...

However, since the code is open sourced, and is available in an SVN repository, it is trivial to roll the clock back to the time of the book release. I will add instructions to the codeplex website to that effect - thanks for the suggestion!

One final thing - I also got my start by reading Dave's books, so it is a great honor to hear him make such a nice comment about our book!

[Nanook]

Cool I'll get the book Dave Eberly says its good and I love his books so must be good I'm not a beginner programmer so it sounds like the book I'm looking for..

Btw. why would anyone want a c++ introduction in a D3D book? Theres lots of good books on c++