In order to incorporate rendering to a texture into my engine, I need to be able to grab the surface object that is associated with a texture object. The following line of code always faults: pD3DRenderedTex->GetSurfaceLevel(0, &pD3DTextureZTarget); pD3DRenderedTex is a IDirect3DTexture8 object and pD3DTextureZTarget is a IDirect3DSurface8 object. I believe the error is occuring since pD3DRenderedTex has not been initialized. This is the first reference to it. However, I do not know how I would go about initializing this object. Can anyone please shed some light on this topic, or any or problems that might be causing this. I do initialize all the objects to NULL in the constructor of the rendering class.