Welcome to the latest volume of ShaderX! This all-new collection is packed with insightful new techniques, innovative approaches to common problems, and practical tools and tricks that will help you in all areas of shader programming. All of the articles evolved from the work and experiences of industry pros, and all of the sections were edited by shader programming experts. With the rapid advances in DirectX, OpenGL, and graphics cards, vertex and pixel shaders are becoming more widely used in high-end graphics and game development. The challenges of mastering these techniques can be daunting for new programmers, but with this comprehensive collection of ready-to-use techniques, they’ll get up to speed quickly. And for the more experienced programmers, they’ll find insights and tricks that will improve their efficiency and prevent redundancy. If you are involved in shader programming, this is a must-have reference for your collection.

ON THE CD: The CD-ROM contains the example programs with source code accompanying the majority of chapters, as well as useful demos, and the latest Microsoft™ DirectX 9 System Development Kit (SDK).

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: To use all of the files on the CD-ROM, you will need the DirectX 9 summer update 2004 SDK, OpenGL 1.5 compatible graphics card, a DirectX 8, 8.1 or 9.0 compatible graphics card; Windows XP with the latest service pack; Visual C++.NET 2003, Visual Studio C/C++ 6.0, 512 MB RAM; 500 MB of free space on your hard drive; Pentium IV/ ATHLON with more than 1.5 GHZ and the latest graphics card drivers.

SAMPLE TOPIC COVERAGE Section 1 Geometry Manipulation: Topology on the GPU; Rendering Complex Formulas; Mesh Object Deforming Using HLSL; Morphing between Two Different Objects; Silhouette Geometry Shaders; GLSL Real-Time Shader Development Section 2 Rendering Techniques: Reflections from Bumpy Surfaces; Massively Parallel Particle Systems on the GPU; Self-Shadowing; Batching via Texture Atlases; Real-Time Texture- Space Skin Rendering; Texture Motion Blur; Animation and Display of Water; Hair Rendering and Shading Section 3 Software Shaders and Shader Programming Tips: Optimizing Dx9 Vertex Shaders for Software Vertex Processing; Software Shaders and DirectX DLL Implementation; Tactical Path-Finding Using Stochastic Maps on the GPUFX Composer 1.5—Standardization Section 4 Image Space: A Steerable Streak Filter; Adaptive Glare; Color Grading; Improved Depth of Field Rendering; Lighting Precomputation Using the Relighting Map; Shaderey— NPR Style Rendering Section 5 Shadows: Poisson Shadow Blur; Fractional-Disk Soft Shadows; Fake Soft Shadows Using Precomputed Visibility Distance Functions; Efficient Omnidirectional Shadow Maps Section 6 3D Engine Design: An Extensible Direct3D Resource Management System; Integrating Shaders into the Vision Rendering Engine; Effect Parameters Manipulation Framework; Shader Visualization Systems for the Art Pipeline; Drawing a Crowd Section 7 Tools Environmental Effects: In-Depth Performance Analyses of DirectX9 Shading Hardware Concerning Pixel Shader and Texture Performance; Shaderbreaker; Generating Shaders from HLSL Fragments Section 8 Environmental Effects: Light Shaft Rendering; Rendering Rainbows; Analytic Model for Daylight with Shaders; Volumetric Clouds

SECTION EDITORS Dean Calver Willem H. de Boer Tom Forsyth Eric Haines Dean Macri Jason L. Mitchell Nicolas Thibieroz

CONTRIBUTORS Wessam Bahnassi Homam Bahnassi Ron Barbosa Florian Born Zoe Brawley Clint S. Brewer Ronny Burkersroda Dean Calver Nicolas Capens Kwok-Hung Choy Willem H. de Boer Joachim Diepstraten Mike Eißele Dag Frommhold David R. Gosselin Shawn Hargreaves O´dell Hicks Daniel Horowitz Gary King Christian Kleinhuis Kent F. Knox Jesse Laeuchli Stefano Lanza Lutz Latta Chi-Sing Leung Bill Licea-Kane Jörn Loviscach Khanh Phong Ly Chris Maughan Jason L. Mitchell Henning Mortveit William Newhall Markus Nuebel Chris Oat Magnus Österlind Aras Pranckevicius Pedro V. Sander Thorsten Scheuermann Natalya Tatarchuk Tiago Sousa Marco Spörl Vlad Stamate Michal Valient Terry Welsh Matthias Wloka Tien-Tsin Wong

Good series

Its hard for me to treat the books of this series separately (ShaderX 3, ShaderX 4, ShaderX 5). They are all very good books of GPU-Gems level or higher. In comparison with GPU Gems, they are more academic, i. e. they are rather short and more applicable to wide range of applications then GPU Gems ones (while GPU Gems series is more scientific, state of the art, considering one particular research) and the accompanying CD is much more better (lots of working examples, most with source code).
Sections (Image-Space, Shadows) are also very helpful to figure out what is useful for you.
This series is not for beginners anyway, so please, go Cg Tutorial or DX SDK Tutorial and don’t put 2 or 3 marks for these books because you can’t cope with them.

a good book for game developers

I’ve bought many other rendering books like GPU Gems series, and I think this book is more practical for game developers compared with the other books. It explains many useful algorithms in good details and covers many aspects that a serious game developer should consider. As a game engine programmer, I think this book is a very good reference for me.

Up To Date View of the State of the Art

This book is a collection of forty-seven articles around the common theme of shading images in real time. Many of these effects have been common in the movie world for many years, but in that application the shading can be done on very expensive machines and the time it takes to produce an image is not important because the resulting image is to be shown on screen rather than immediately on a display. Now, with the increasing power in the PC’s in widespread use, these techniques are being brought down to the standard desktop.

In this book a wide selection of authors discuss the start of the art in shading. They are, for the most part, active professionally in the graphics display business. A number of them work for ATI, the video card manufacturer, a number work for gaming companies, or for companies producing software used in gaming.

This approach provides for a fast time to print, rather than one author taking a year to write the book. In this industry a year is a lifetime, well, at least a generation in the software.

A comprehensive collection of ready-to-use techniques

Shader X3: Advanced Rendering With DirectX And Open GL compiled, organized, and deftly edited by Wolfgang Engle (Senior Special FX Engineer at Wings Simulations) is packed from cover to cover with 630-pages of insightful new techniques, innovative approaches to common problems, as well as practical tools and tricks that will help in all areas of shader programming. All of the articles comprising Shader X3 evolved from the the working experiences of industry professionals, and all of the sections were expertly edited by shader programming experts. This comprehensive collection of ready-to-use techniques will enable even the most novice programmer to get up to speed quickly, and the more experienced programmers will find a wealth of insights and techniques to improve efficiency and avoid redundancies. Shader X3 is an essential, "user friendly", and highly recommended instructional reference for shader programmers.