Normal vector

You''ll want to use the crossproduct, like so:

VECTOR V1,V2,V3, N;

N = Normalize(CrossProduct(V2-V1,V3-V1));

Remember that the direction of the normal depends on the order of its arguments so you must be consistent in the ordering.

If you don''t want to calculate normals yourself and want dx to calculate lighting and your app is not realtime, then you can use d3ddev.setrenderstate D3DRENDERSTATE_NORMALIZENORMALS, TRUE.

That doesn''t calculate the normals, it only normalizes them.

Doesn''t it do it for lighting only though? Isn''t that the solution to Floru''s problem? It is of course a horrible way to do it.

D3DRENDERSTATE_NORMALIZENORMALS should be set to true as your Direct3D drivers are usually much faster at normalizing than anything you can do yourself (unless you do some insane optimizations ). However, for the lighting to work you have to calculate the direction of the surface normal, and that is computed with the crossproduct as in my above answer.

The D3DRENDERSTATE_NORMALIZENORMALS state is usually used to be able to keep the right magnitude of the normals after transformations, for example scaling.