Overviews

This section provides overview articles that discuss various aspects of Microsoft® Direct3D® Retained Mode. The first two topics provide general information concerning the Direct3D Retained Mode interfaces, including a hierarchy chart and an article that details the history and changes between versions of the interfaces.

The following topics focus on a specific aspect of Direct3D Retained Mode. For a description of each interface's methods, see the appropriate entry in the Reference.

Direct3D Retained Mode 6 has added support for external visuals. External Visuals provide a method to allow custom hierarchy objects in the Direct3D Retained Mode (D3DRM) hierarchy. These are COM objects which support the IDirect3DRMExternalVisual interface (and any others they wish to support). D3DRM treats these objects as first-class visual objects, allowing for custom rendering, picking, bounding box reporting, and other behaviors. This is more powerful than the User Visuals supported in earlier versions of D3DRM, which only allowed for custom rendering using a callback function. External Visuals provides an extension mechanism that allows any type of visual object, such as deformable meshes or inverse kinematic solvers, to be inserted into the D3DRM visual hierarchy.

Although you can access External Visuals from D3DRM, they support DirectX Transform interfaces and can be used from the DirectX Transform DXETool.exe. For this reason, they are documented in DirectX Transform in the DirectX Media SDK. For more information about External Visuals, please see the Reference section of the DirectX Transform documentation in the DirectX Media SDK.