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)

Dealing with buffers in Vulkan

Buffers in Vulkan are regions of memory that store data that can be rendered on the GPU. To render a 3D scene using the Vulkan API, we must transform the scene data into a format that's suitable for the GPU. In this recipe, we will describe how to create a GPU buffer and upload vertex data into it.

Getting ready

Uploading data into GPU buffers is an operation that is executed, just like any other Vulkan operation, using command buffers. This means we need to have a command queue that's capable of performing transfer operations. We learned how to create and use command buffers earlier in this chapter, in the Using Vulkan command buffers recipe.

How to do it...

Let's create some helper functions for dealing with different buffers:

  1. First, we need the findMemoryType() function, which selects an appropriate heap type on the GPU, based on the required properties and a filter:
    uint32_t findMemoryType(  VkPhysicalDevice...