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)

Generating textures in Vulkan using compute shaders

Now that we can initialize and use compute shaders, it is time to give a few examples of how to use these. Let's start with some basic procedural texture generation. In this recipe, we implement a small program to display animated textures whose pixel values are calculated in real time inside our custom compute shader. To add even more value to this recipe, we will port a GLSL shader from https://www.shadertoy.com to our Vulkan compute shader.

Getting ready

The compute pipeline creation code and Vulkan application initialization are the same as in the Initializing compute shaders in Vulkan recipe. Make sure you read this before proceeding further. To use and display the generated texture, we need a textured quad renderer. Its complete source code can be found in shared/vkRenderers/VulkanSingleQuad.cpp. We will not focus on its internals here because, at this point, it should be easy for you to implement such a renderer...