I'm trying to add cubic environment mapping and stenciled volumetric shadows to the 3D engine my roommate and I are creating. Call me stupid, call me lazy, but I don't feel like working out all the code for doing "simple" tasks like this when it's already been done by a few thousand people, all of whom probably did it in a tenth of the time it would take me to figure it out. However, I can't seem to find any good examples anywhere. The DXSDK is basically useless in terms of describing how to do each of these (the help file basically tells you what a cube map is, and an overly complicated explanation on how to create one, without describing how to render it to an object properly), and all of their examples use their framework, so you can never see exactly what is happening, or figure out how to extract the necessary code for a program that doesn't use their framework. Every time I do a search for tutorials or examples on either of these methods, all I come up with is OpenGL code, or at best DirectX8 code using vertex and/or pixel shaders that require a GeForce 3/Radeon 8500 or better. Since I know diddly about OpenGL, and the most advanced graphics cards we have in this apartment are GeForce 2 GTS's, these don't help me much.
So, does anyone know of a good, simple, straightforward example of implementing stencil shadows and cubic environment maps on DX7 hardware, using DirectX? Source code would be helpful, but not necessary, as long as it explains it so someone mildly intelligent but not very experienced can understand. It really sucks trying to learn things when the only documentation you can find seems to be written towards people who should know how to do it already (or at the least, are experts at all of the aspects of 3D rendering except the one thing they're describing).
Hopefully someday APIs will reach the point where you don't have to know and understand everything the API is hiding from you in order to be able to use it effectively
So, does anyone know of a good, simple, straightforward example of implementing stencil shadows and cubic environment maps on DX7 hardware, using DirectX? Source code would be helpful, but not necessary, as long as it explains it so someone mildly intelligent but not very experienced can understand. It really sucks trying to learn things when the only documentation you can find seems to be written towards people who should know how to do it already (or at the least, are experts at all of the aspects of 3D rendering except the one thing they're describing).
Hopefully someday APIs will reach the point where you don't have to know and understand everything the API is hiding from you in order to be able to use it effectively
