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 data-oriented design for a scene graph

To represent complex nested visual objects such as robotic arms, planetary systems, or deeply branched animated trees, you can split the object into parts and keep track of the hierarchical relationships between them. A directed graph of parent-child relationships between different objects in a scene is called a scene graph. We are deliberately avoiding using the words "acyclic graph" here because, for convenience, you may decide to use circular references between nodes in a controlled way. Most 3D graphics tutorials aimed at hobbyists lead directly down the simple but non-optimal path we identified in the previous recipe, How not to do a scene graph. Let's go a bit deeper into the rabbit hole and learn how to apply data-oriented design to implement a faster scene graph.

In this recipe, we will learn how to get started with a decently performant scene graph design. Our focus will be on scene graphs with fixed hierarchies...