An Introduction to HLSL (Part II)

Continuing on in our exploration of HLSL, let’s look at building a simple shader that applies a texture to a model using UV coordinates. Read more

An Introduction to HLSL (Part I)

In a previous article we looked at how to use custom shaders when rendering models, or as post-processing effects when applied to an entire scene. Now let’s look at how to build our own shaders. Read more

Building an XNA Skybox with Blender

While you’ll find a lot of skydome tutorials on the net, sometimes you just want a simple skybox. Here’s how to build one in a few minutes in Blender. Read more

A Few New XNA Tutorials

A couple new XNA tutorials you might want to check out popped up on my radar recently.

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A Reusable XACT Component

This isn’t a how-to article, it’s more of a let’s discuss article. Sound and music often take a back seat when we’re developing a game, and maybe we want it to stay that way. How would you go about creating a reusable XACT wrapper class that would suit just about any purpose? Here’s how I did mine. Read more

XNA Tetris in 24 Hours

The “Tetris in 24 Hours” challenge is over, and the total dev time clocked in at just over 15 hours. This was about more than just coding up Tetris for the 360. It was also about figuring out some aspects of XNA I was unfamiliar with, as well as parsing someone else’s code (namely, the GameStateManagement example from creators.xna.com). Read more

Modeling for XNA with Blender Part IV

In the final part of the Blender/XNA series, we add two animations to our textured model, load it into the SkinnedSample using the new content processor, and switch between animation clips. Read more

Modeling for XNA with Blender Part III

To this point, we’ve covered some basic modeling and texturing concepts. You should now know how to build a model and UV texture it. In part III, we’ll add a skeleton to a mesh in preparation for animation. Read more

Modelling for XNA with Blender Part II

Last time we built a cube and laid a texture over it. In part II, we’ll build a more complicated mesh, unwrap it, and build a UV map to map our mesh’s vertices to a custom texture. We’ll look at some basic Blender modeling techniques along the way as well. Read more

Modelling for XNA with Blender Part I

In this series, we will look at using Blender to build models and assets for use in XNA games. In part I, we build a cube, apply a texture to it, and export it to fbx format. Read more

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