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)

Implementing offscreen rendering in OpenGL

Before we can proceed with generic postprocessing effects, let's implement some basic OpenGL machinery for offscreen rendering using framebuffer objects. We will rely on this code throughout the remaining chapters of this book to implement various rendering and postprocessing techniques.

Getting ready

The code for this recipe is located in the shared/glFramework/GLFramebuffer.h. file. It would be helpful to quickly go through the entire code before reading the rest of this recipe.

How to do it…

Let's implement a simple GLFramebuffer class to handle all the underlying OpenGL framebuffer objects' manipulations and attachments:

  1. Our framebuffer implementation holds the width and height dimensions of the framebuffer, its OpenGL handle, and two GLTexture objects, for color and depth buffers respectively. As we do not need to render into multiple render targets, having just one of each buffer is sufficient...