Managed DirectX® 9 Kick Start: Graphics and Game Programming

Texturing Our Objects

While rendering with colors and lights is quite exciting, objects don't look realistic enough if this is all we are using. The term “texture” when describing non-3D applications is usually in reference to the roughness of an object. Textures in a 3D scene are essentially flat 2D bitmaps that can be used to simulate a texture on a primitive. You might want to take a bitmap of grass to make a nice looking hill, or perhaps clouds to make a sky. Direct3D can render up to eight textures at a time for each primitive, but for now, let's just deal with a single texture per primitive.

Since Direct3D uses a generic bitmap as its texture format, any bitmap you load can be used to texture an object. How is the flat 2D bitmap converted ...