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)

Implementing computed meshes in Vulkan

In the Initializing compute shaders in Vulkan recipe, we learned how to initialize the compute pipeline in Vulkan. We are going to need it in this chapter to implement a BRDF precomputation tool for our PBR pipeline. But before that, let's learn a few simple and interesting ways to use compute shaders in Vulkan and combine this feature with mesh geometry generation on the GPU.

We are going to run a compute shader to create triangulated geometry of a three-dimensional (3D) torus knot shape with different P and Q parameters.

Important note

A torus knot is a special kind of knot that lies on the surface of an unknotted torus in 3D space. Each torus knot is specified by a pair of p and q coprime integers. You can read more on this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus_knot.

The data produced by the compute shader is stored in a shader storage buffer and used in a vertex shader in a typical programmable-vertex-fetch way. To make the...