Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
4 (2)
Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

4 (2)
By: Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

Overview of this book

OpenGL is a popular cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, while Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics API that targets high-performance applications. 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook helps you learn about modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using C++ programming along with OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. The book begins by setting up a development environment and takes you through the steps involved in building a 3D rendering engine with the help of basic, yet self-contained, recipes. Each recipe will enable you to incrementally add features to your codebase and show you how to integrate different 3D rendering techniques and algorithms into one large project. You'll also get to grips with core techniques such as physically based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. As you advance, you'll explore common techniques and solutions that will help you to work with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering. Finally, you'll discover how to apply optimization techniques to build performant and feature-rich graphics applications. By the end of this 3D rendering book, you'll have gained an improved understanding of best practices used in modern graphics APIs and be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Intercepting OpenGL API calls

Sometimes, it is very desirable to intercept OpenGL API calls for debugging purposes or, for example, to manipulate the underlying OpenGL state before passing API calls into the real OpenGL system. You can do this to simulate mobile OpenGL on top of a desktop OpenGL implementation or vice versa. Manually writing wrappers for each and every API function is a tedious and thankless job. In this recipe, you will learn how to quickly make custom OpenGL hooks and use them in your applications.

Getting ready

This recipe uses a Python script to parse glcorearb.h and generate all the necessary scaffolding code for the wrapper functions. The complete source code for this recipe can be found in this book's source code bundle, under the name Chapter3/GL01_APIWrapping.

How to do it...

Let's write a small OpenGL application that prints all the GL API functions that have been used, along with their parameters, in the console window while the application...