Particle Systems using Stream-Out in DirectX 11 and SlimDX

Particle systems are a technique commonly used to simulate chaotic phenomena, which are not easy to render using normal polygons.  Some common examples include fire, smoke, rain, snow, or sparks.  The particle system implementation that we are going to develop will be general enough to support many different effects; we will be using the GPU’s StreamOut stage to update our particle systems, which means that all of the physics calculations and logic to update the particles will reside in our shader code, so that by substituting different shaders, we can achieve different effects using our base particle system implementation.

The code for this example was adapted from Chapter 20 of Frank Luna’s Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct3D 11.0, ported to C# and SlimDX.  The full source for the example can be found at my GitHub repository, at https://github.com/ericrrichards/dx11.git, under the ParticlesDemo project.

Below, you can see the results of adding two particles systems to our terrain demo.  At the center of the screen, we have a flame particle effect, along with a rain particle effect.

Geometry Shader Billboards with SlimDX and DirectX 11

When I first learned about programming DirectX using shaders, it was back when DirectX 9 was the newest thing around.  Back then, there were only two stages in the shader pipeline, the Vertex and Pixel shaders that we have been utilizing thus far.  DirectX 10 introduced the geometry shader, which allows us to modify entire geometric primitives on the hardware, after they have gone through the vertex shader.

One application of this capability is rendering billboards.  Billboarding is a common technique for rendering far-off objects or minor scene details, by replacing a full 3D object with a texture drawn to a quad that is oriented towards the viewer.  This is much less performance-intensive, and for far-off objects and minor details, provides a good-enough approximation.  As an example, many games use billboarding to render grass or other foliage, and the Total War series renders far-away units as billboard sprites (In Medieval Total War II, you can see this by zooming in and out on a unit; at a certain point, you’ll see the unit “pop”, which is the point where the Total War engine switches from rendering sprite billboards to rendering the full 3D model).  The older way of rendering billboards required one to maintain a dynamic vertex buffer of the quads for the billboards, and to transform the vertices to orient towards the viewer on the CPU whenever the camera moved.  Dynamic vertex buffers have a lot of overhead, because it is necessary to re-upload the geometry to the GPU every time it changes, along with the additional overhead of uploading four vertices per billboard.  Using the geometry shader, we can use a static vertex buffer of 3D points, with only a single vertex per billboard, and expand the point to a camera-aligned quad in the geometry shader.

We’ll illustrate this technique by porting the TreeBillboard example from Chapter 11 of Frank Luna’s Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct3D 11.0.  This demo builds upon our previous Alpha-blending example, adding some tree billboards to the scene.  You can download the full code for this example from my GitHub repository, at https://github.com/ericrrichards/dx11.git under the TreeBillboardDemo project.