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)

Loading texture assets asynchronously

All our demos up to this point have preloaded all the assets at startup, before anything can be rendered. This is okay for applications where the size of the data is small, and everything can be loaded in an instant. Once our content gets into the territory of gigabytes, a mechanism would be desirable to stream assets as required. Let's extend our demos with some basic lazy-loading functionality to load textures while the application is already rendering a scene. Multithreading will be done using the Taskflow library and standard C++14 capabilities.

Getting ready

We recommend revisiting the Multithreading with Taskflow recipe of Chapter 2, Using Essential Libraries.

The source code for this recipe can be found in Chapter10/GL04_LazyLoading.

How to do it...

To make things simple, the idea behind our approach is to replace the GLSceneData class, which handled all scene loading so far, with another class called GLSceneDataLazy...