Introduction

A mesh is technically just a vertex and index buffer that represents a 3D object, and if we look at what we have already covered, we can easily understand this. However, these objects nearly always require a number of additional properties, such as material (surface and lighting properties), textures, submeshes, bones, and animations. This is what Microsoft has done in the past with their ID3DX10Mesh interface; however, this is not available for Direct3D 11 (along with a number of other utility classes), and it is now recommended that you roll your own.

Note

There are other open source projects that provide the replacement functionality, part of which is used in the SharpDX Toolkit and part of which we will be using here. Most notable is the DirectX Tool Kit that is available at https://directxtk.codeplex.com/.

For our purpose, a mesh is the combination of submeshes, materials, object extent, bones, animations, and references to common assets such as textures and shaders. We will...