Tutorial 4: Creating and Using Lights

Microsoft® Direct3D® lights add more realism to 3-D objects. When used, each geometric object in the scene will be lit based on the location and type of lights that are used. The sample code in this tutorial introduces the topics of lights and materials.

This tutorial has the following steps to create a material and a light.

• Step 1: Initializing Scene Geometry
• Step 2: Setting up Material and Light

Note  The path of the Lights sample project is:

    (SDK root)\Samples\Multimedia\Direct3D\Tutorials\Tut04_Lights.

The sample code in the Lights project is nearly identical to the sample code in the Matrices project. The Creating and Using Lights tutorial focuses only on the code unique to creating and using lights and does not cover setting up Direct3D, handling Microsoft Windows messages, rendering, or shutting down. For information on these tasks, see Tutorial 1: Creating a Device.

This tutorial uses custom vertices and a vertex buffer to display geometry. For more information on selecting a custom vertex type and implementing a vertex buffer, see Tutorial 2: Rendering Vertices.

This tutorial makes use of matrices to transform geometry. For more information on matrices and transformations, see Tutorial 3: Using Matrices.