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 lightweight rendering queues in OpenGL

All our previous rendering examples in this book were built with the assumption that an indirect draw call renders the entire collection of loaded meshes using the currently bound shader program. This functionality is sufficient to implement simple rendering techniques, where all the meshes can be treated the same way—for example, we can take the entire scene geometry and render it using a shadow-mapping shader program. Then, we take exactly the same scene geometry and render it entirely using another shader program to apply texture mapping. As we try to build a more complex rendering engine, this approach immediately breaks because different parts of the scene require different treatment. It can be as simple as different materials or as complex as having opaque and transparent surfaces, which may require completely different rendering code paths.

One naive solution to this problem would be to physically separate the actual...