ANN: D3D Movie "The Triangle Build Up Of An F1 Car"

jollyjeffers · 2005-06-23T19:58:31

Evening all, I wish to announce a project that I've been working on for a few weeks now. I'm hoping you'll like it! What is it? I've made a 60 second movie showing how a 3D mesh is constructed in Direct3D9. It's a little difficult to explain, but it shows as a form of animation the steps that go on "behind the scenes" when you despatch a mesh to be rendered. It's aimed mostly at beginners - a sort of visual introduction to the process that they'll be trying to learn. It's unlikely there's anything ground breaking for intermediate/advanced D3D programmers, but you might find it interesting... TheTriangleMakeUpOfAnF1Car.zip (13.73mb). Grab this file, inside is a .AVI file encoded using the DivX codec. It should play fine in all reasonably up-to-date players. Background As you may or may not know, I've written 100's of articles on DirectX over the last few years. I wanted to try something new - and I'm not 100% sure yet that this format will work out. Given the somewhat obviously graphical nature behind Direct3D programming the goal was to create a video that demonstrates various aspects of how a D3D application works. One that might not be immediately obvious from looking at the code, mathematics and diagrams that often make up the bulk of introductory materials. In some respects, interactive source code that ships with articles does this job, but with a video it's easier for me (the author) to focus on particular things in a particular order. Also, for some advanced techniques a video could well show these off without having to worry about the end-user not being able to run the code. If people appreciate this video and there's some favourable feedback, then I've already given thought to making some more useful videos. This current video can be considered as an experiment of sorts. A bit of explanation As you'll see, the video runs through 4 distinct phases. It's fairly self-explanatory, but I thought I'd include a brief run-down here... This first section shows, as green dots, each vertex that builds up the mesh. With this view you can see how the key points of the mesh are positioned. The second part of the movie effectively joins up the dots, showing the outlines of each triangle as blue lines. With the outlines of the triangles displayed, the renderer starts to fill in the content of each triangle based on the correct material-based lighting. This is the build-up of the display that you would be expecting to see if you were to request Direct3D to render it. With the build up complete, the movie shows a rotation of the final mesh rendering. There are two particular things to note about this whole sequence: (1) In actually rendering a mesh, D3D doesn't do the first two phases of drawing the dots and connecting them up [smile]. I've put that in to show the progression of how the data contained in a mesh fits together to build the final product. (2) There is an interesting pattern to the order in which vertices and triangles are actually rendered. It is logical, but one of the things that this sort of movie was leading to (but didn't end up fitting in) is a visual "proof" of why a depth buffer (and associated things) might be necessary. Your thoughts? As mentioned above, this whole project is a bit of an experiment. I'm not aware of there being any similar videos available (my initial searches didn't yield anything). Any thought you have are greatly appreciated. Leave a post here or send me a private message I'm gonna run away and hide for now and come back later to check any replies - fingers crossed it'll be more than Cheers, Jack

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming

Started by jollyjeffers May 16, 2005 03:20 PM

22 comments, last by Tape_Worm 18 years, 10 months ago

jollyjeffers

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May 18, 2005 05:24 PM

Quote:Original post by hannibal84
I love what you've done. It would go great with supporting text or (even better) a voice-over.

From a design point of view, this is what I would want. However, I don't hav a decent microphone and/or voice talents [wink]

Quote:Original post by hannibal84
I actually ran across a site where someone was making DirectX tutorial videos, but I don't remember the link.

If you think of the name/url then send me a PM (or post here). I'd like to see that site.

Quote:Original post by Nizro
That's actually a pretty cool idea. Especially beginners should get some sort of insigt in how the process works, and where you can gain performance

I haven't been thinking of it in terms of performance.

To be brutally honest to the beginners here (and on other forums I frequent!) I see a lot of very similar questions. Ones that I've answered a lot of times, ones that are referenced in the Forum FAQ. However, a lot of them only make sense when you've made the mistake and corrected it yourself.

The idea consequently is that if I show people, as a movie, what went wrong and what fixed it. Or, changing X affects Y hence you get Z - watch my movie and you'll see how and why this is the case.

The feedback is appreciated [smile]

Cheers,
Jack

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Jack Hoxley [ Forum FAQ | Revised FAQ | MVP Profile | Developer Journal ]

Nizro

134

May 18, 2005 11:47 PM

Quote:I haven't been thinking of it in terms of performance.

What I was trying to say, was that the progressive 'build-up' shows how the stuff is dealt with (vertices being passed, linked and then shaded...). The numbers shown during the process gave me some kind of idea of where a lot of work is done, and where you might hit it to speed up.

jollyjeffers

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May 19, 2005 03:49 AM

Quote:Original post by Nizro
Quote:I haven't been thinking of it in terms of performance.

What I was trying to say, was that the progressive 'build-up' shows how the stuff is dealt with (vertices being passed, linked and then shaded...). The numbers shown during the process gave me some kind of idea of where a lot of work is done, and where you might hit it to speed up.

Okay, I understand [smile]

Although, remember:

Quote:(1) In actually rendering a mesh, D3D doesn't do the first two phases of drawing the dots and connecting them up [smile]. I've put that in to show the progression of how the data contained in a mesh fits together to build the final product.

As an aside, one of things I've contemplated was showing some heirachical culling algorithms (e.g. QuadTree) working from a "non camera" point of view... that would probably give a good idea of how/why culling is a good idea.

Jack

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Jack Hoxley [ Forum FAQ | Revised FAQ | MVP Profile | Developer Journal ]

Trip99

577

May 20, 2005 11:05 AM

This would be a very useful thing to show my first year games programming students - is there going to be a fixed home for it?

------------------------See my games programming site at: www.toymaker.info

jollyjeffers

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May 21, 2005 06:31 AM

Quote:Original post by Trip99
This would be a very useful thing to show my first year games programming students - is there going to be a fixed home for it?

I currently have no plans to delete and/or move the file. It's occupying ~50% of my GDNet+ webspace; I suppose if I really needed to use that space for something else I might look for some different hosting (I've had a few generous offers)..

You're more than welcome to keep a copy of the archive on your own website / server for your university course.

Also, if you're wanting to use it for your university course (very cool idea! [smile]) I could sort out a better quality copy. I was constrained by the limits of server space (and download times), but the original (high quality, uncompressed) that I was working from is over 300mb [grin].

Thanks for your interest in my video!
Jack

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Jack Hoxley [ Forum FAQ | Revised FAQ | MVP Profile | Developer Journal ]

mrmrcoleman

320

May 25, 2005 07:32 AM

Great work mate... To get around the AVI size problem why not make this into an application? You script the building of the car and the voice overs, you could have Stop/Play/Rewind etc etc. Also, I don't know if you fancy taking this any further but I have a small recording studio so if you fancy trying out some voice work PM me and I'll do it for free. Don't know who will do the voice over though, I sound a bit Northern!

Eee By Gum, it's a vertex...!

Mark Coleman

jollyjeffers

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May 25, 2005 08:35 AM

Quote:Original post by mrmrcoleman
Great work mate...

Quote:Original post by mrmrcoleman
To get around the AVI size problem why not make this into an application? You script the building of the car and the voice overs, you could have Stop/Play/Rewind etc etc.

That would be a good way of reducing size, but one of the reasons behind it being a video file is to get around any issues with hardware/driver support.

It doesn't hold for this particular video, but if I were to take it any further and use particular feature(s) such as SM2/SM3 shaders it could cause problems. Then again, I suppose most features worth covering will probably be fairly well supported [oh]

Quote:Original post by mrmrcoleman
Also, I don't know if you fancy taking this any further but I have a small recording studio so if you fancy trying out some voice work PM me and I'll do it for free. Don't know who will do the voice over though, I sound a bit Northern!

Eee By Gum, it's a vertex...!

[lol] Thanks for the offer - greatly appreciated [smile]. I have no plans to make another video in the immediate future (next month or so), but I think I will give it another go soon. I've got a few ideas though..

It would be great to have a voice over explaining whats on-screen, it would add a lot of value to it.

Cheers,
Jack

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Jack Hoxley [ Forum FAQ | Revised FAQ | MVP Profile | Developer Journal ]

Trip99

577

May 27, 2005 02:16 PM

Jolly - if you do do another version then great, otherwise I can use this one. Our semester is just finishing anyway so I would not use it until the end of summer. Thanks.

------------------------See my games programming site at: www.toymaker.info

jollyjeffers

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June 01, 2005 10:40 AM

Quote:Original post by Trip99
Jolly - if you do do another version then great, otherwise I can use this one. Our semester is just finishing anyway so I would not use it until the end of summer. Thanks.

Found out this morning that another university has recently used that video for their graphics course [oh]

Anyway, if you want to PM me any ideas of how you'd want to get your hands on a higher resolution / uncompressed version that'd be great... I don't have any webspace to even temporarily store a file that big [grin]

Jack

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Jack Hoxley [ Forum FAQ | Revised FAQ | MVP Profile | Developer Journal ]

Jiia

593

June 08, 2005 12:23 PM

What a cool video! How did you get the gradual rendering accomplished? I suppose you could just keep increasing the rendering buffer counts? But to have them render in that specific order was really cool.

Funny how I've never seen this until now. Shame on me for ignoring stickies [smile]

Good work!

ANN: D3D Movie "The Triangle Build Up Of An F1 Car"

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