Question

I am currently developing a Direct3D 11 rendering engine using C#.

I have already succeded in drawing triangles, applying color and textures, etc.
The object I am trying to display now is a rotated cube with a side length of 1 placed at the origin of the world space.
But I am getting unsatisfying results when applying the view and especially the projection matrix. As it is difficult to explain, I just show you what result I get for different view/projection combinations:

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HLSL snippet from my vertex shader:

float4x4 wvpMatrix = mul(World, mul(View, Projection));
output.Position = mul(input.Position, wvpMatrix);

The world matrix I use:

// Static rotation around all three axes
matrices.World = Matrix.Identity * Matrix.CreateFromYawPitchRoll(0.5f, 0.6f, 1.0f);

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Test A

Simple view vector from origin in the positive z direction. No projection used.
You can see that the back of the cube is being clipped.

matrices.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(0, 0, 0), new Vector3(0, 0, 1), Vector3.Up);
matrices.Projection = Matrix.Identity;

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Test B

View matrix stays the same, but now I am using an orthographic projection matrix.
This time the front of the cube vanishes. The parts you can see are those which were clipped in Test A.

matrices.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(0, 0, 0), new Vector3(0, 0, 1), Vector3.Up);
matrices.Projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographic(2, 2, 0.01f, 100.0f);

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Test C

Again no projection, just like in Test A. This time the scene is being viewed from a point three units in the negative z direction.
The cube looks distorted when the camera position is not set to the origin of the system. I think there is also some clipping.

matrices.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(0, 0, -3), new Vector3(0, 0, 1), Vector3.Up);
matrices.Projection = Matrix.Identity;

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Test D

Finally, I use a perspective projection. Up to now I have not found a camera position from which any part of the cube is visible. All I get is fullscreen cornflower blue.

matrices.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(0, 0, -3), new Vector3(0, 0, 1), Vector3.Up);
matrices.Projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(1, 1, 0.1f, 100);

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First thing I want to do is drawing the full cube – no clipping. I tried different combinations of near/far plane values but I could not find an acceptable solution.
My final goal would be to have a perspective projection. But as you see I can’t even get a good orthagonal view of the scene.

Answer 1

The matrices must be transposed at some point.

Reason:

The layout of the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix struct is row-based. Matrices in HLSL are column-based.

From the XNA Documentation:

Matrices use a row vector layout in the XNA Framework.

From the Wikipedia article on matrix order:

Column-major order is a similar method of flattening arrays onto
linear memory, but the columns are listed in sequence. The […] shading languages
GLSL and HLSL use column-major ordering.

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Solution A:

Transpose all matrices before they are sent to the shader:

var projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(1, 1, 0.1f, 100);
projection = Matrix.Transpose(projection);

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Solution B:

Put this line in your shader code:

#pragma pack_matrix( row_major )