Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
3 (1)
Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

3 (1)
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 LODs using MeshOptimizer

Earlier in this chapter, in the Implementing a geometry conversion tool recipe, we talked about preprocessing a mesh so that we can store it in a runtime efficient data format. One important part of the preprocessing pipeline is optimizing geometry and generating simplified meshes for real-time discrete LOD algorithms that we might want to use later. Let's learn how to generate simplified meshes using the MeshOptimizer library.

Getting ready

It is recommended that you revisit the Introducing MeshOptimizer recipe from Chapter 2, Using Essential Libraries. The complete source code for this recipe can be found in Chapter5/MeshConvert.

How to do it...

We are going to add a processLODs() function to our MeshConverter tool so that we can generate all of the necessary LOD meshes for a specified set of indices and vertices. Let's go through this function step by step to learn how to do it:

  1. The LOD meshes are represented as a...