Good mornin all. New question for you guys today, but it's a bit more subjective I'm afraid. I have been following one of the many "beginners DirectX" tutorials out there, and currently I'm on the obligatory "texture map and light a cube" portion. So it seems to work fine, except for one difference. The author's code produces a cube that seems smoothly lit accross the faces, whereas mine seems grainy. My cube has these very clearly defined "lighting layers" as vertices get farther from the light source. I am using the same lighting parameters as the author, and the same texture map. The only real difference I can think of is that my cube is 2x2x2 with a light source at a distance of 5, whereas his cube is 15x15x15 with a light source at a distance of 20. I adjusted my viewing position and my light attenuation/range to compensate for my smaller cubes. Could this be the reason my lighting looks grainy? Or are there other settings which tend to produce really layered-looking shading like that? I didn't notice any settings for color depth, or shading preferences in the author's code. Thanks for any help anyone can give! Mike

Have you normalized your vertex normals? Unnormalized normals may cause incorrect lighting results. There is a function in D3DX to do this, D3DXVec3Normalize(). Note that you only have to do this once, when initializing your cube.

Well, I set my normals manually at the beginning, and I have them sticking straight out in the X, Y or Z direction, depending on which way the face starts out as. ( ie: all normals for vertices on the top face are (0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f), etc. ) My understanding of a normalized vector is that the magnitude is 1, so aren't my normals normalized to begin with in this case? ( being that the magnitude equation for 3D vectors is SQRT( x^2 + y^2 + z^2 ) )

Is there something I'm forgetting?

DrakeX:

How do I set a higher color depth than 16? And where? Is it a property of the D3D device?

Hmm, your normals seem just fine, so grainy lighting is not their fault...

Quote:Original post by Michael Kron
How do I set a higher color depth than 16? And where? Is it a property of the D3D device?

Yes, it's a device property. It's the BackBufferFormat member of D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS. Try setting it to some 32-bit D3DFORMAT, such as D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8, if you haven't already.

My app is full screen, so this might be the culprit. Thanks, I'll give that a try. BTW, what is the difference between the two 32bit formats you guys are suggesting?

D3DFMT_X8R8G8B8

vs

D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8

?