Twenty-one days. One renderer. Every picture in the book drawn by the program you wrote.
Direct3D 12 is not a hard API to read. It is a hard API to start: nothing works until nine things are right at once, and when one is wrong the program runs, the card draws, and the picture is wrong with nothing printed anywhere.
This book starts them one at a time. On Day 1 you have a device, a command list and a triangle in a PNG -- and no window, because a window is three hundred lines of Win32 that teach nothing about graphics. By Day 14 you walk through a torch-lit stone hall with real shadows and normal-mapped stone. By Day 21 Emberforge is a 480-kilobyte folder that runs on a machine with no SDK.
Everything in it was run. 427 figures across 21 chapters, 216 of them frames Emberforge rendered and wrote to disk itself -- not one screen grab anywhere. 194 listings, every one compiled. 58 output blocks, captured not typed. 21 engine snapshots, one a day, each building on its own, so a day that misses can be diffed against the one before.
YOUR 21-DAY PATH
- Day 1 - Your First Picture: a device, a command list, and a triangle in a PNG.
- Day 2 - A Window, and the Swap Chain: three buffers, a fence, and a picture on the screen.
- Day 3 - Vertices, Indices, and the Input Assembler: upload heaps, the input layout, and a pipeline state.
- Day 4 - Matrices, Constant Buffers, and the Spin: world, view and projection, and a cube that turns.
- Day 5 - Depth, and Which Triangle Wins: a depth buffer, so distance decides what you see.
- Day 6 - Textures, Descriptor Heaps, and Samplers: mip maps, sampler state, and every texel made in code.
- Day 7 - The Frame Loop, Properly: three frames in flight, and the first milliseconds.
- Day 8 - Meshes, and Building the Hall: eight meshes in one pair of buffers.
- Day 9 - Normals and the First Light: the normal matrix, and why scaling breaks a normal.
- Day 10 - Point Lights, and the Torches: four lights in one block, three falloff models compared.
- Day 11 - Materials and the Root Signature: descriptor tables you laid out, and six real materials.
- Day 12 - The Camera You Drive: raw mouse input, and a scripted path that renders the book.
- Day 13 - The Hall Casts a Shadow: a depth-only pass, and the two ways bias goes wrong.
- Day 14 - Rough Stone, Polished Gold: tangents, normal maps, roughness, metalness and GGX.
- Day 15 - Passes, and Resources That Know What They Are: the frame as a list, each resource tracking itself.
- Day 16 - The Torches Get Hot: a float target, a bright pass, a blur, ACES and gamma.
- Day 17 - Three Thousand Embers the CPU Never Touches: compute shaders, UAVs, and a dispatch grid that fits.
- Day 18 - Four Hundred Crates, One Draw Call: one instanced call, and a cull that counts what it drops.
- Day 19 - The Hall, in a File: a text format, and the nine digits a float really needs.
- Day 20 - The Engine Times Itself: GPU timestamps, a warm-up, and a median of twenty-one.
- Day 21 - A Folder Somebody Else Can Run: a static CRT, a debug layer off, and no SDK needed.
WHO IT IS FOR. A C++ programmer who has not written graphics before, or who knows some OpenGL or Direct3D 11 and wants to know why 12 looks so different. You need pointers, structs and a compiler; Day 4 builds the linear algebra. You need Windows, Visual Studio and a card at feature level 11_0 -- and nothing else installed: no engine, no framework, no package manager, no library and no downloaded assets, because every texture is a function and every mesh is a loop.
538 pages, in colour.
