| Lets
face it - we dont want to spend all our time manually inputting vertices.
There comes a time when wed like to load our scenes produced by our hard
working artists and start making our game look realistic instead of a bunch
of blocks - and that time is now. So we need to understand how data is arranged
in a Graphics file, so that we can load the data into our code -> and display
it to screen. Now it wouldnt make much sense to write code that could read
from every type of model (*.3ds, *.max, *.maya), etc. Fortunately, there
are a number of tools that convert all these files into a format easily
understood by DirectX - the *.X file. In order to convert these files into
the *.X format we use an exporter, such as conv3DS.exe for 3D Studio Max
models. Once youve got everything in this format, youll need to come up
with a mesh class to read in these files -> the book has a pretty decent
description how to use a mesh, but you need to come up with a class that
encapsulates all the functionality, such as loading a mesh from file and
rendering the mesh. |