I am just learning about 3D programming and tried the tutorial from wazoo (www.wazooenterprises.com). I got it to where it displays and rotates the box, but I get some strange effects. I put in lpD3DD->SetRenderState(D3DCULLMODE, D3DCULL_NONE) and when it draws the box, it seems like it draws the sides first, then the top(or lid) and then the bottom. The end effect is that bottom and the top cover up the sides. However, if I turn the cull mode to D3DCULL_CCW or just comment out the line, it all appears just fine. Maybe I am misunderstanding what the D3DCULL_NONE is supposed to do. Maybe my videocard just isn''t that great, but I would like to know if anyone knows why this maybe happening and what the correct/best way to fix it is. Thank you for your time! "I kinda think, therefore, I kinda... am?"

Well I''m not a D3D programmer, but if you''re getting the faces of your box looking wrong then perhaps you need to enable the Z-buffer?

I assume D3DCULL_NONE means don''t perform backface culling.

um... D3DCULL_CCW is the default mode set by Direct3D, so to set it into that mode won''t have any effect. (hence: no difference if you comment it out or not)...


lurkie

That would explane why I get the same effect when I use D3DCULL_CCW and comment out the line, but what about with D3DCULL_NONE? I still don't get why it does what it does. I have posted a picture with side by side comparisons on my site,http://psychocatt.sphosting.com/cube.html
Maybe I just didn't explane it clear enough, since I don't really understand what is happening. Thanks for your time!

"I kinda think, therefore, I kinda... am?"

Edited by - Psychocatt on November 27, 2000 3:35:24 PM

I don''t know if the Z-buffer is enabled or not. Like I said, I''m just starting learning. I am doing the tutorial at wazoo''s website. http://www.wazooenterprises.com/tutorials/tutorial1-D3D8.asp
I don''t see anything about the Z-buffer. There is only information about the vertex and index buffer. I have heard about the z buffer(and a w buffer) but I don''t really know anything about them. I would like to learn about 3D, but I don''t really know if I am ready. Maybe I should just stick to 2D for now.

"I kinda think, therefore, I kinda... am?"

Backface culling means that the GPU (or whatever) doesn't draw the faces that aren't facing the camera.

This is done by checking if the normal of the face points towards or away from the camera.

The CCW and CW (counter clock wise, resp clock wise), tell D3D in what order your vertices are defined. If you just draw a triangle on a piece of paper, you have no way of knowing which is the front and which is the back side (it's just 3 points). By being consistent in the way that the vertices of in face as ordered, D3D knows which side is front and which side is back.

What happens when you turn off back face culling (D3DCULL_NONE) is that you tell D3D not to throw away any triangles, regardless of the direction they are facing. The triangles will be drawn in the order they are given, without any rejection (due to bfc), which means that sometimes it will look okay, and sometimes not.

Z-Buffer will solve this for you. A Z-buffer is just an array (the same size as the screen) that holds the value of the closest point to the camera for each pixel. Before drawing a new pixel, D3D will check if the pixel it is about to draw is closer than the one in the z-buffer, if it is, it will draw the pixel, and update the z-buffer, otherwise it will just skip the pixel all together..

Hope this helps,
Magnus

Edited by - dooz on November 28, 2000 4:13:17 AM

Ok, I looked up some information on buffers in the SDK docs. I would think that I could enable the z-buffer by calling SetRenderState( D3DRS_ZENABLE, TRUE) to enable it and then I could change how it calculates this by calling SetRenderState with D3DRS_ZFUNC. The SDK help did mention somthing about a w-buffer and I have heard it mentioned before, but the explanation didn''t realy go into detail. Is this similar to the z-buffer or is it better? I though in 3D there were only 3 dimensions. Thanks for your time!

"I kinda think, therefore, I kinda... am?"