Silverlight 5 in Action

Chapter 27. 3D lighting, texturing, and animation

 

This chapter covers

• Effects, lighting, and normal vectors
• Texturing objects
• Coordinate spaces and matrices
• Keyframe animation

 

In the previous chapter, you modeled a sphere and rendered it in 3D. You could tell it was 3D due to the curvature of the bands, but it wasn’t nicely shaded, and it definitely wasn’t lit. A key part of what makes a rendering convincing as 3D is the lighting.

In DirectX-based 3D systems, lighting is handled by various shaders. These shaders, which run directly on the video card, are small, high-performance algorithms that anyone can write. In XNA, a DirectX-based system, the shaders are encapsulated in a class derived from the Effect class. Throughout this chapter ...