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)

Indirect rendering in Vulkan

Indirect rendering is the process of issuing drawing commands to the graphics API, where most of the parameters to those commands come from GPU buffers. It is a part of many modern GPU usage paradigms, and it exists in all contemporary rendering APIs in some form. For example, we can do indirect rendering with OpenGL using the glDraw*Indirect*() family of functions. Instead of dealing with OpenGL here, let's get more technical and learn how to combine indirect rendering in Vulkan with the mesh data format that we introduced in the Organizing the storage of mesh data recipe.

Getting ready

Once we have defined the mesh data structures, we also need to render them. To do this, we allocate GPU buffers for the vertex and index data using the previously described functions, upload all the data to GPU, and, finally, fill the command buffers to render these buffers at each frame.

The whole point of the previously defined Mesh data structure is the...