Direct3D, Part 3: Using Meshes to Save and Load Complex Scenes

n Part 1 of this series, you saw how to get started with Direct3D, Microsoft's high-performance three-dimensional graphics library. Part 2 explained how to make scenes more realistic by adding lighting and textures to objects. The result of applying those two techniques is often a complex scene containing many objects displayed with different colors, textures, and material characteristics, such as reflectivity.

Because building such complex scenes takes time, it might be nice to be able to save the results so you can load them again later. While it would be simple to save the result as a bitmap file, it would be better if you could save the scene's geometry and texture information so you could load the scene and manipulate it in three dimensions later.