Graphics Programming with Direct X 9 Part I

The course begins by introducing some of the important mesh containers provided by the D3DX library. Discussion will center on performance issues, including attribute batching across mesh boundaries and subset rendering, as well as optimization techniques that speed up rendering on modern hardware. From there we will look at how to import X file geometry into our applications as well as how to construct and fill the mesh buffers manually. This will lead into a discussion of cloning (copying) mesh data and some of the features that can be exploited in the process. The next topic of discussion will be the management of geometric level of detail using view independent progressive meshes. We will look at how to construct and use progressive meshes and see how they work algorithmically. This will lead into an examination of one-off mesh simplification and how it can be done with D3DX support. We will conclude this lesson with a quick overview of a number of useful mesh utility functions.