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)

Importing materials from Assimp

In Chapter 5, Working with Geometry Data, we learned how to define a runtime data storage format for mesh geometry. This recipe will show you how to use the Assimp library to extract material properties from Assimp data structures. Combined with the next recipe, which will cover our SceneConverter tool, this concludes the process of describing our data content exporting pipeline.

Getting ready

In the previous recipe, we learned how to render multiple meshes with different materials. Now, it is time to learn how to import the material data from popular 3D asset formats.

How to do it...

Let's take a look at the convertAIMaterialToDescription() function that's used in the SceneConverter tool. It retrieves all the required parameters from the aiMaterial structure and returns a MaterialDescription object that can be used with our GLSL shaders. Let's take a look:

  1. Each texture is addressed by an integer identifier. We will...