Learning XNA 3.0

Primitive Types

So, you're cruising along, enjoying the ride through XNA 3D-land...but it still isn't that exciting. You've created a cool-looking triangle and moved it around, but that's about it. While the triangle has a cool effect with the blended colors, you'll probably never see a full game done completely with colors like this. Typically, when drawing in 3D you'll be drawing primitives and then applying textures to those primitives.

Tip

Applying a texture? What's that? As you've learned in previous chapters of this book, a texture represents a 2D bitmap or other image. Textures in 3D graphics are often mapped to 3D surfaces on objects (such as your triangle in the previous example). This process of mapping a 2D texture to a 3D surface is referred to as applying a texture.

So, in the rest of this chapter, we'll be focusing on applying a texture to your triangle. However, you're going to use a rectangular texture, so you'll need to convert your triangle to a rectangle. How can this be done? Well, you can't just start drawing rectangles—you need to draw using triangles. However, two triangles next to each other can form a square or rectangle.

Change the code in your LoadContent method that initializes your vertex array to the following:

verts = new VertexPositionColor[4]; verts[0] = new VertexPositionColor(new Vector3(−1, 1, 0), Color.Blue); verts[1] = new VertexPositionColor(new Vector3(1, 1, 0), Color.Yellow); verts[2] = new VertexPositionColor(new Vector3(−1, −1, 0), Color.Green); ...