Hull Shader terminology

Question

I've fairly new to shader programming, I've some work on xna/directx9 but now I'd like to shift to c++/directx 11. I started reading about hull/domain shader for tesselation from this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476340(v=vs.85).aspx#Hull_Shader_Stage but I'm having an hard time since I'm not familiar with some of the terminology. I know that it's probably a trivial question, but could you explain to me what is a patch ? And a control point? What are the patch-constant phase and the control-point phase?

Answer 1

Hull shader is part of tessellation which refers to increasing the geometric detail by adding more triangle.

You need to read some books about DirectX 11 they should give more explanation to these terminology.

1. http://books.google.com.sa/books?id=lV_mrpFoP1UC&pg=PA156&dq=hull+shader&hl=ar&sa=X&ei=yGEIU5SoI_On0wWo3oDwBw&safe=on&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=hull%20shader&f=false

2. http://books.google.com.sa/books?id=FDShAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT48&dq=hull+shader&hl=ar&sa=X&ei=kmEIU7CEO8TB0gWk4oCICQ&ved=0CDkQuwUwAQ#v=onepage&q=hull%20shader&f=false