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)

Using Vulkan descriptor sets

A descriptor set object is an object that holds a set of descriptors. Think of each descriptor as a handle or a pointer to a resource. We can think of a descriptor set as everything that is "external" to the graphics pipeline or as a resource set. Also, the descriptor set is the only way to specify which textures and buffers can be used by the shader modules in the pipeline. The Vulkan API does not allow you to bind individual resources in shaders; they must be grouped into sets, and only a limited number of descriptor sets can be bound to a given pipeline. This design decision was mostly due to the limitations of some legacy hardware, which must be able to run Vulkan applications. In the next few chapters, we will learn how to partially overcome this constraint on modern hardware with Vulkan 1.2.

Now, let's learn how to work with descriptor sets in Vulkan.

How to do it...

Descriptor sets cannot be created directly. They must come...