Good Direct3D 11 book for someone who already knows OpenGL

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11 comments, last by Jason Z 10 years, 2 months ago

Completely agree with Icebone1000, Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 is a great book. Tons of details & great explanation.

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A problem with Luna's Direct3d 11 book is getting the samples to compile and run without a lot of problems. The book itself appears to be pretty good, but you'll have to create your own projects, perhaps copying code from the downloaded samples. I finally gave up since I couldn't get past the samples for Chapter 4 without spending an hour or more on each sample, searching for the reasons for compile/run errors, just, for instance, to display a static vertex shaded cube.

Note: some of the problems aren't (directly) Luna's fault. Microsoft made some (later) changes which screwed things up. E.g., Luna used VS2005 for the samples. Later versions of VS don't like his setup. Some of the fixes for problems are addressed in various places, but you'll have to spend some time searching around for those fixes. However, Luna's fault or not, having to create your own projects because Luna's won't compile/run is a pain and makes actually learning DX11 a side issue rather than the purpose of the exercise.

Also, getting help with his book/samples is problematic. The d3dcoder.net forums are pretty inactive and most of the posts are now spam (selling houses, kitchens, etc.) I'm not even sure there are any moderators for the forums anymore. It's a shame, 'cuz Luna's DX9 book(s) and samples are excellent.

Please don't PM me with questions. Post them in the forums for everyone's benefit, and I can embarrass myself publicly.

You don't forget how to play when you grow old; you grow old when you forget how to play.

I would agree with MJP about our book - it sounds like it is directed at your demographic (experienced developer, knows graphics already...). You can take a look at the code for the samples, which is provided along with the rendering framework on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex page under the MIT license. That will give you a flavor of the samples and the quality level of the software.

You can also take a look on Google or Amazon to see a sampling of the pages. Roughly half of the book is about the API (resources, pipeline, compute, tessellation, multithreaded rendering) and the rest is dedicated to sample algorithms. I think it will help you get started.

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