Wolfgang F. Engel is a Senior Graphics Programmer in the core technology group at Rockstar San Diego. He is the editor of the ShaderX book series and the author of Programming Vertex and Pixel Shaders. Wolfgang is a frequent speaker on conferences worldwide and publishes articles on several websites. Since July 2006, Wolfgang has been a Microsoft DirectX MVP.

The ShaderX series provides a complete toolbox of cutting-edge advanced graphics hardware and software techniques for all levels of graphics programmers, from novices to graphics gurus. With the increasing pixel shader power of current graphics cards, techniques that were once done on the CPU or simply avoided due to their expense are now possible, and this latest volume of the ShaderX series is filled with articles that provide methods for performing these techniques. The collection covers state-of-the-art, shader rendering techniques that will bring your graphics to a new level of realism. Throughout the book you'll find a plethora of all new, ready-to-use solutions and tools for the many graphics programming challenges you face everyday. These solutions will save valuable programming time, helping to make you more efficient and productive. Throughout the collection you?ll find: How to simulate cloth on the GPU; How to use ambient occlusion efficiently in a game environment; Several global illumination approaches suitable for current hardware platforms; How to do real-time caustics on the GPU; Several ways for how to make your shadow penumbra software for shadow volumes and shadow maps; Tips for using the D3DXEffects framework efficiently and how to integrate post processing; Real-time damage system that uses a damage map to store damage data; Snow rendering; Procedural generation of textures; Tricks, tips, and techniques for super shader, a light map precomputation tool that stores radiosity light maps, and a system for debugging and optimizing applications, and much more... This is an indispensable series that should be on ever graphics programmer's bookshelf!