Vulkan-based Rendering Engine

A lightweight rendering engine built on top of Vulkan, designed to abstract away the low-level complexity while maintaining flexibility. The engine provides a simple API for loading and rendering 3D scenes while allowing direct access to the underlying graphics pipeline for experimentation.

Demo

Building and Running

Prerequisites

• Vulkan SDK
• GLFW3
• GLM
• CMake (3.22+)
• A C++17 compliant compiler

Building

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Shader Compilation

The engine expects compiled SPIR-V shaders in the ./shaders/ directory relative to where you run the executable. To compile the shaders, use:

cd shaders
glslc shader.vert -o vert.spv
glslc shader.frag -o frag.spv

Or use the provided shell script (requires path to glslc):

cd shaders
./compile.sh /path/to/glslc

Running the demo

./build/RenderEngine path/to/your/model.gltf

Note: the demo looks for shaders/frag.spv and shaders/vert.spv in the current working directory, instead of looking for them more intelligently.

Controls

The demo uses a first-person camera control scheme:

• W/S - Move forward/backward
• A/D - Strafe left/right
• Space/Shift - Move up/down
• Mouse - Look around
• Scroll - Zoom in/out

Extending the Engine

The engine is designed to be extensible. Here are some quick ways to experiment:

1. Custom Shading: The fastest way to experiment is by modifying the fragment shader (shader.frag). You can implement different lighting models or add post-processing effects.

2. New Renderables: The engine's renderable system is extensible - you can create new types of renderables by implementing custom render passes.

3. Custom Attachments: Add new uniform buffers or texture attachments to pass additional data to your shaders.

For example, to modify the lighting model, you would edit the fragment shader's main function in shaders/shader.frag:

void main() {
    // Your custom lighting calculations here
}

Remember to recompile shaders after any modifications.