Catalin's XNA Experiments

I’m happy to announce a new tutorial, which happened by chance I accidentally stumbled upon some old drafts of mine for a project that never saw the light of day, and I decided to post one of those drafts online. It talks about the High Level Shading Language, some of its history, syntax and structure. [...]

Those that follow my twitter account have seen this already, but I wanted to let everyone know I’m working on a system for 2D dynamic shadows, again. However, this one is very different from the last sample I made on the subject. In that one, you had to define the geometry of the shadow casters, [...]

I had NVIDIA’s FX Composer installed on my PC for a long time now, as part of my development tools, but rarely used it after installing it. Usually, when I want to experiment with a new shader, I boot up XNA GS, add a random model to the scene, add a new Effect file, apply [...]

I’m going to go on vacation soon, so I’m putting the July sample online. It’s not much, since I’ve been busy writing the Fur Rendering Tutorial, but I think it’s a nice effect. The sample is dedicated to Rim Lighting, an effect seen in some "cute" games. Read more about it and get the source [...]

My fur rendering article just went online on Ziggyware. It is an entry for the Summer Ziggyware XNA Article Contest, so if you like it, vote for it when voting begins, in a few days. The article explains how to draw fur, animate it, and apply it on models. You can read it here.

Fake Rim Lighting, for use in cute games (inspired by Super Mario Galaxy screenshots) Fur

I’m releasing a small library for shadow mapping in XNA. This is the beginning of a library that will allow using shadow maps in XNA without writing a new shader, or setting up your models. Just using some calls to a library class. I also included a small example of using the library with 1 [...]

Yes it can My may sample is also my first public sample written in XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP, and it shows how to restore the depth buffer from a depth texture. This way, models drawn to a render target, with post processing applied to them can intersect and obscure normal models, drawn after all [...]

This is a repost from the old blog, since this is one of those interesting stuff, which weren’t big enough to warrant a sample. Working on my VTF tutorial, I came across the need to apply lighting to a terrain. For lighting, we need normals, of course, but I only had heightmaps available. When the [...]

In response to some people asking me how to start learning shader programming, I made a list of some resources that could prove helpful when learning HLSL: The Shader Series, found on creators.xna.com are a very good set of articles and samples, that explain the basic knowledge needed to understand and write shaders in HLSL. [...]