Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10

Chapter 8

Blending

Consider Figure 8.1. We start rendering the frame by first drawing the terrain followed by the wooden crate, so that the terrain and crate pixels are on the back buffer. We then draw the water surface to the back buffer using blending, so that the water pixels are combined with the terrain and crate pixels on the back buffer in such a way that the terrain and crate show through the water. In this chapter, we examine blending techniques that allow us to blend (combine) the pixels that we are currently rasterizing (so-called source pixels) with the pixels that were previously rasterized to the back buffer (so-called destination pixels). This technique enables us, among other things, to render semi-transparent objects such as ...