The geometry instancing allows us to render multiple instances of the same object in a single rendering API call. These multiple instances differ in their generic attributes, such as transformation matrices, color, scale, and so on. This feature is very useful to implement particle systems, crowd simulation, rendering of jungle trees, and so on. Compared to the traditional way of rendering multiple objects that use multiple rendering calls, this technique is very efficient as it requires a single API call. This reduces the overhead of CPU processing in sending multiple rendering calls to the OpenGL ES rendering engine.

This recipe demonstrates the rendering of 1000 cubes using geometric instancing. For this, we will use 1000 matrices in a VBO. Each matrix contains a transformation to place a cube in the 3D space. The information of the matrices are updated using the range map buffer feature as discussed in the previous recipe. This allows us...