Before you can do this tutorial, you will need the following:

1.  Visual Studio 2005 (or Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition)*.
2.  A knowledge of basic C++ and Win32 programming.
3.  DirectX SDK (February 2005 or later) and a knowledge of its basics.
4.  A burning desire to make games.

* - other versions of C++ compilers will also run DirectX, however, there are some language specific changes you may need to make in each of the demo applications.

Fortunately, there is an easier way to create 3D graphics than coding each vertex into a buffer.  That would just be insanity and would take game developers years to make modern graphics, let alone the game engine.  Meshes get rid of all that hassle, and allow you to build 3D artwork in a separate program, load it into your game and render it as a single entity.

The Utah Teapot is cool and all, but it really doesn't suit the purposes of a game.  I mean, sure you can decorate the rooms with teapots (if you really want), but driving around in a half-converted, unpainted teapot tends to bore the general populace.  In this lesson we will go over how to load your own 3D models drawn up in 3D modeling programs.

In the last lesson you made a spaceship.  Untextured, but it was a spaceship!  *Gasp*!  Now we get to learn about textures.  OK, so we've learned this already, but textures can be stored inside X files, and getting the texture from the mesh and then setting them is what this lesson will cover.

If you try to render Tiny.x from the DirectX samples using the code we have so far, you'll find it doesn't really work.  In this lesson we'll cover animated meshes. This is a long lesson, but teaches the basics of animated meshes and how best to do them.  We'll take the Tiny.x model and render it, but it will be animated! 

This tutorial has three more projected lessons.  These will mostly cover optimization of meshes as well as specific aspects of animation.  The entire goal of this tutorial is for you to become a master at handling models, and manipulating them the way you see fit.