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)

Organizing Vulkan frame rendering code

As we learned from the previous chapter, the Vulkan API is pretty verbose. We need something to conceal the API's verbosity and organize our frame rendering code in a manageable way. Let's assume that each frame is composed of multiple layers, just like an image in a graphics editor. The first, and rather formal, layer is the solid background color. The next layer might be a 3D scene with models and lights. On top of a beautifully rendered 3D scene, we could optionally add some wireframe meshes to draw useful debugging information. These wireframe objects belong in another layer. Next, we add a 2D user interface, for example, using the ImGui library. There might be some additional layers, such as fullscreen charts with performance statistics or frames-per-second (FPS) counters. Finally, the finishing layer transitions the swapchain image to the VK_LAYOUT_PRESENT_SRC_KHR layout.

In this recipe, we define an interface to render a single...