3D Fundamentals Tutorial 12

The vertex shader is the one of the two original shaders introduced in Direct3D 8, and it is the only shader besides the pixel shader that must be provided before triangles can be rendered. It's kind of a big deal.

Video

The tutorial video is on YouTube here.

• What is a Vertex Shader (vs) and its position in the pipeline 0:20

• A vs takes in vertices of the geometries and applies transformations to them
• Our current pipeline function ProcessVertices() does this in the most basic form: it applies rotation and translation to move vertices of the mesh from object space to world space
• In this video, we will be making the vs configurable

• Code implementation walk-through 1:14

• Pipeline.h 1:14

- We apply a std::transform() on the vertices vector

- We create a new datatype VSOut, giving the vs the power to change the datatype of the output vertices

- Note: this can be through a typedef or by implementing a new output type

- Each vertex shader will define its output type

• Effect::VertexShader 3:33
• DefaultVertexShader.h 4:06
• Scene definition 5:02

• Demo: creating a wave effect 5:24

• Plane.h defines Tesselation of a plane object 6:28
• WaveVertexTextureEffect.h implements the sinusoid wave effect 7:21
• VertexWaveScene.h 9:48

• Example where Vertex Output type is different from Vertex Input Type 10:48

• Example effect: the color of the vertex is determined by its position
• The input vertex type only holds position as data member, we add color in the output data type VSOut
• You can procedurally add information to your vertices in the vs

Downloads

The GitHub repository for the tutorial code is here.

See also

• Planet Chili Patreon
• Next in series (Tutorial 13)
• 3D Fundamentals Series