Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 22)

After struggling for a bit with the shadow mapping implementation, I finally have something presentable. I followed a tutorial from Microsoft and thought I understood what was happening. However, it required a lot of changes in the rendering code and it took a little while to get things

Review: Digital Modeling by William Vaughan

There is no question, Digital Modeling by William Vaughan is a book every 3D modeler (or aspiring modeler) should read. It really captures the essence of what makes a good model, and doesn’t get bogged down with technical details of specific modeling packages. In this review, I will briefly

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 21)

After a few days of hacking away at the code, I’ve got a new video up. In this update I have added normal mapping and specular lighting. I did have a few set-backs while working on the shaders, and it was made even more difficult since I was

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 20)

Spent the last couple days adding in skybox support into the engine. Currently it’s a little hard-coded, but it does seem to be working well. I also bumped the field of view (FOV) up to 90 (from 45) so you can see more of the sky. I wanted

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 19)

While getting models loaded was pretty exciting, I ended up dealing with major load times on the demo. Granted, my XML parsing code is probably slow as all hell, but I don’t think COLLADA is really designed for real-time engine use. With simple plane and cube shapes the

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 18)

What you see above is a custom model I made in 3ds Max, exported as a COLLADA *.dae file, and imported into my DirectX engine. I figured I’d start with something simple, like a soda can, and I plan to make a lot more models going forward. Although

Insane Physics Simulation From Nvidia

  This has got to be one of the more insane physics demos I’ve seen so far. Most physics engine handles the basic rigid bodies and such, but start to fall apart with more complex interactions (i.e. fluid and cloth simulations). With the demo shown above, from Nvidia, it