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excellent presentations and online materials. Their direct and indirect help is greatly appreciated. Also,
I’d like to thank Sim Dietrich for taking the time and effort to write the foreword.
All the people mentioned above contributed in some way to the better aspects of this book. I deeply
appreciate their contributions.
About the Author
Kelly Dempski has been a researcher at Accenture’s Technology Labs for seven years. His research
work has been in the areas of multimedia, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Interactive TV, with a
strong focus on photo-realistic rendering and interactive techniques. He has authored several papers
and one of his projects is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent collection on Information
Technology.
Letter from the Series Editor
Let me start by saying, buy this book! Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX is simply
the most advanced DirectX book on the market—period! The material in this book will be found in no
other book, and that’s all there is to it. I am certain that the author Kelly Dempski is an alien from
another world since there’s no way a human could know this much about advanced DirectX. I know
since I am from another planet <SMILE>. This book covers all the topics you have always heard about,
but never knew exactly how to implement in real time.
In recent times, Direct3D has become a very complex and powerful API that leverages hardware to the
max. The programmers at Microsoft are not playing games with it and Direct3D is in sync with the
hardware that it supports, meaning if there is hardware out there that does something, you can be sure
that Direct3D can take advantage of it. In fact, Direct3D has support for operations that don’t exist.
Makes me wonder if Bill has a time machine. The only downfall to all this technology and functionality is
that the learning curve is many months to years—and that’s no joke. Try learning Direct3D on your own,
and it will take you 1–2 years to master it. The days of just figuring things out are over, you need a
master to teach you, and then you can advance from there.
Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX starts off making no assumptions about what
you know. The first part of the book covers mathematics, matrices, and more. After that groundwork is
laid, general Direct3D is covered in l, so we are all on the same page. The coverage of Direct3D alone
is worth the price of the book. However, after the basic Direct3D coverage, the book starts into special
effects programming using various advanced techniques like vertex shaders and pixel shaders. This
stuff is completely voodoo. It’s not like it’s hard, but you simply would have no idea where to start if you
were to read the DirectX SDK. Kelly knows where to start, where to end, and what goes in the middle.
Now, I don’t want to get you too excited, but if you read this book you WILL know how to perform such
operations as advanced texture blending, lighting, shadow mapping, refraction, reflection, fog, and a
bazillion other cool effects such as “cartoon” shading. What I like about this book is that it really does
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