Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Lapinski
Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By: Lapinski

Overview of this book

Vulkan is the next generation graphics API released by the Khronos group. It is expected to be the successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, which it shares some similarities with such as its cross-platform capabilities, programmed pipeline stages, or nomenclature. Vulkan is a low-level API that gives developers much more control over the hardware, but also adds new responsibilities such as explicit memory and resources management. With it, though, Vulkan is expected to be much faster. This book is your guide to understanding Vulkan through a series of recipes. We start off by teaching you how to create instances in Vulkan and choose the device on which operations will be performed. You will then explore more complex topics such as command buffers, resources and memory management, pipelines, GLSL shaders, render passes, and more. Gradually, the book moves on to teach you advanced rendering techniques, how to draw 3D scenes, and how to improve the performance of your applications. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the latest advanced techniques implemented with the Vulkan API, which can be used on a wide range of platforms.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Loading a 3D model from an OBJ file

Rendering 3D scenes requires us to draw objects, which are also called models or meshes. A mesh is a collection of vertices (points) with information about how these vertices form surfaces or faces (usually triangles).

Objects are prepared in modeling software or CAD programs. They can be stored in many various formats, which are later loaded in 3D applications, provided to graphics hardware, and then rendered. One of the simpler file types, which holds mesh data, is a Wavefront OBJ. We will learn how to load models stored in this format.

Getting ready

There are multiple libraries that allow us to load OBJ files (or other file types). One of the simpler, yet very fast and still being improved, libraries is a tinyobjloader developed...