3D Theory/Concept (Or something) Articles

Anyone know of any good 3D theory articles? I'm looking for something to explain all the nice effects/concepts like normalmapping/bumpmapping/per-pixel-lighting, specular highlighting,shaders (SHADERS!!!! BIG ARROW HERE), fog, 3D coords, texture mapping, and such. I'd like to know how these are achieved (and for some, what they are XD).

I've really been leaning towards more powerful, new graphics theory/tech lately, andI've read a whole bunch of stuff off of Game Dev.net 'n' such, and I just want
to learn more! 3D Theory is awesome and fun. So much you can do! This stuff is really interesting me right now.


Other stuff I'm wanting to read about:
Real time terrain rendering...
3D Simulations All the nice new tech/theory like specular highlighting,HDR (Or HDI, I forget ),ect.
3D Coordinates, like using vectors,matrices and such

I've found a lot of good, useful info on some college websites by reading the classnotes.


Or maybe I'm just being daft...



Kind of like this: http://www.justadventure.com/articles/3D/3DGraphicsTrens.shtm but more in
depth and more towards how they are achieved and practiced. Maybe a bit of GL code... And not old ;)

I've been learning about shaders for implementing in ColdSteel so i found some nice links:


http://www.facewound.com/tutorials/shader1/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/HLSL_Shaders.asp

That's about how to use/make shaders, not about how they work but im sure you can find related stuff. Don't know why you'd need to know 3d engine theory tho, it's perfectly stupid to make your own engine with so many around already.

Oh and, most of the stuff you mentioned in your post is actually done through _shaders_ ... at least in the modern day and age. So learn those, it's fun. And it isn't that hard especially if you used something like 3ds max to make nice renders, it's pretty much the same logic and terms.

The article you posted as an example is pretty basic tho, it's "popular science" rather than "technical literature" hehe

Thanks for the links. :)


Wait, are you saying the facewound tutorials work with
Coldsteel? That uses Irrlicht, and it doesn't support .fx
shaders...

.fx = HLSL = GLSL pretty much (with very small modifications) ... so yes shaders you can see in facewound example will work with ColdSteel when i get the time to figure them out because Irrlicht supports HLSL and everything in them up to shader model 3.0, and they'll work in BMax3d, Cobra, etc.

Very cool little things i tell ya.

After you read through a few pages of the microsoft refference you should know how to convert from .fx to HLSL, there's hardly anything to change actually. You just need to know what's what. And then you can make your own shaders with tools such as Nvidia fx composer ;) but that may take a bit more experience to get it all working. With nice tutorials it won't be that hard.