VulkanRenderer

Summary

Vulkan 3D renderer is built on Vulkan API

But there will be more graphics backend such as OpenGL and DirectX 12
There are only C and C++ interface headers for now.

Tested on

Windows 11 64 bit
Windows 10 64 bit
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB (VRAM) Discrete Mobile GPU + 8 GB of Main Memory (RAM)
AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics 512 MB (VRAM) Integratred Mobile GPU + 8 GB of Main Memory (RAM)
AMD Vega 8 Graphics 512 MB (VRAM) Integrated Mobile GPU + 12 GB of Main Memory (RAM)

Requirements for building on Windows

Msys2
Vulkan SDK
MINGW 11.2.0 (tested on this, but might also work with previous versions), you can check if it is already installed in your machine by running
```
$gcc --version
```
OR
```
$g++ --version
```
If this isn’t already installed, run the following in MSYS2 MinGW shell
```
$pacman -S gcc
```
GNU Make 4.3, you can check if it is already installed, though it already comes with mingw64 binutils package, by running
```
$ make --version
```
If this isn’t already installed, run the following in MSYS2 MinGW shell
```
$ pacman -S make
```
Git version 2.35.1, git must be installed in your machine, you can check if it is already installed by running
```
$ git --version
```
If this isn’t already installed, run the following in MSYS2 MinGW shell
```
$ pacman -S git
```
glslc, glslc can be installed as follows, run the following in MSYS2 MinGW shell
```
$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-shaderc
```

Requirements for building on Linux (Debian)

Vulkan Tools
```
$ sudo apt-get install vulkan-tools
```
Vulkan SDK
- Download vulkan sdk for linux (debian) from https://www.lunarg.com/vulkan-sdk/
- Extract the archive by tar -xvf <archive name>
- Change directoy into the extracted folder, usually name as version number 1.x.x.x
- Export SDK environment variables, source ./setup-env.sh
- Or you may also just install vulkan-sdk via apt, sudo apt-get install vulkan-sdk
GCC 11.2.0 (tested on this, but might also work with previous versions), you can check if it is already installed in your machine by running
```
$ gcc --version
```
OR
```
$ g++ --version
```
If this isn’t already installed, run the following in the terminal
```
$ sudo apt-get install gcc
```
You might also need to install build-essentials in case you encounter any standar library header inclusion errors:
```
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install build-essentials
```
GNU Make 4.3, you can check if it is already installed, though it already comes with mingw64 binutils package, by running
```
$ make --version
```
If this isn’t already installed, run the following in the terminal
```
$ sudo apt-get install make
```
Git version 2.35.1, git must be installed in your machine, you can check if it is already installed by running
```
$ git --version
```
If this isn’t already installed, run the following in the terminal
```
$ sudo apt-get install git
```

You might also need to install the followings:

$ sudo apt-get install libshaderc-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libgl-dev
$ sudo apt-get install spirv-tools
$ sudo apt-get install libvulkan-dev 
$ sudo apt-get install libz-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libpng-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libbrotli-dev

On wayland you would need the following package:
```
$ sudo apt-get install libwayland-dev
```

Requirements for building on FreeBSD

Currently you can’t build the codebase in FreeBSD environment. There are many issues right now. For now, you would need to do the following:

The shell must be changed to /sh/bash, FreeBSD uses a different shell by default
You will need gcc and g++ compilers supporting C++20, FreeBSD uses LLVM/Clang by default

Install the following packages

  pkg install gmake # for GNU make
  pkg install shaderc # for shaderc libraries and glslc
  pkg install pkgconf # for pkg-config

For Building SUTK (Spectrum UI Toolkit library), you will need cmake

On Linux

   apt install cmake

On Windows (MSYS)

   pacman -S cmake

On FreeBSD

   pkg install cmake

Runtime requirements

Windows 64 bit
GPU supporting vulkan api (integrated or discrete)
Main memory (RAM) - No data as of now
Disk space - No data as of now
Better to have Vulkan LunarG SDK installed for additional debugging and vulkan configuration (validation layers), but it is not a requirement because the static library and headers are already included in the repository and would be updated as new updates will come in future.

Building steps

Clone the repository by running the following command

$git clone https://github.com/ravi688/VulkanRenderer.git

Change the working directory to VulkanRenderer and setup all the dependency git submodules by running the following command
```
$cd VulkanRenderer
$make -s setup
```
Start building by running the following command
```
$make -s build
```
OR
```
$make -s build-debug
```
For release mode
```
$make -s build-release
```

Building executable manually (Optional)

Change the working directory to VulkanRenderer and build the main executable by running the following command
```
$make -s debug
```
Now run the main executable by running the following command
```
$./main
```

Test Run (Optional)

There are several tests which you can try running by just passing arguments:

$cd <build directory>
$./main CUBE

The above set of commands would launch a window in which a white cube will be spinning. If you want to see all the possible test cases, you may launch the execution without any arguments and it would just print the list of possible test cases:

$./main
supported tests:
        DEPTH_RENDER_TEXTURE
        DEPTH_RENDER_TEXTURE_LOAD
        ENVIRONMENT_REFLECTIONS
        ENVIRONMENT_REFLECTIONS_LOAD
        DEPTH_CUBE_RENDER_TEXTURE
        DEPTH_CUBE_RENDER_TEXTURE_LOAD
        POINT_LIGHT_SHADOWS
        POINT_LIGHT_SHADOWS_LOAD
        SPOT_LIGHT
        SPOT_LIGHT_LOAD
        CUBE
        TEXTURE_SAMPLING
        TEXTURE_SAMPLING_ALPHA_CHANNEL
        TEXT_MESH
        BITMAP_TEXT
        TID_14_CASE_1
        TID_14_CASE_2
        TID_14_CASE_3
        TID_28_CASE_1
        TID_28_CASE_2
        TID_28_CASE_3
        TID_28_CASE_4
        TID_42_CASE_1
        TID_43_CASE_1
        TID_43_CASE_2
        TID_43_CASE_3
        TID_43_CASE_4
        TID_48_CASE_1
        TID_48_CASE_2
        TID_48_CASE_3
        TID_48_CASE_4
        TID_48_CASE_5

Cleaning everything (Optional)

Change the working directory to VulkanRenderer and run the following command
```
$make -s clean
```

Building SUTK (Spectrum UI Toolkit)

On Windows (MSYS)

$ cd sutk
$ ./setup_lunasvg.sh
$ make -s build-debug -j6

On Linux (Debian)

$ cd sutk
$ chmod +x ./setup_lunasvg.sh
$ sudo ./setup_lunasvg.sh
$ make -s build-debug -j6

Features

Multipass Rendering

Render Pass Pool to avoid pass duplication
Sorting Render Passes using Topological Sort to minimize multiple runs of the same render pass.

Render Queues

Background Render Queue
Geometry Render Queue
Overlay Render Queue
General Purpose Render Queues

Render Textures (Hybrid render textures)

A camera can render its depth and color output to a user supplied textures - both at the same time.

Depth Render Texture
One can redirect the depth render output of a camera to a depth render texture
Color Render Texture
One can redirect the color render output of a camrea to a color render texture
Depth Cube Render Texture (Shadow map for point lights)
One can redirect the depth render output of 360 view (6 faces of a cube) to a cube depth render texture - which can further be used as a shadow map for point lights.
Color Cube Render Texture (Environment map for reflection effects)
One can redirect the color render output of 360 view (6 faces of a cube) to a cube color render texture - which can further be used as a environment reflection map.

Textures and Cubemaps

Normal Map
Albedo Map
Skybox & Reflection cubemap

Camera System

Multiple Cameras
Render Target switching
Orthographic and Perspective Projection
Split rendering

Lights

Directional lights
Point lights
Spot lights

Meshes

Support for ASCII STL, BINARY STL
Support for ASCII OBJ
Mesh Trangulation and Quadrangulation
Tangent Vector Generation

Text Mesh Rendering

Glyph pool to avoid glyph mesh duplication
High performance internal data structure to frequently update the text data
Text Mesh batching

Bitmap Text Rendering

Glyph Bitmap Atlas to avoid glyph bitmap duplication
Text Layout Callback to customize the placement of glyphs.

Materials

String to fast integer handles for constant lookup

Shaders

Multiple Render passes and Subpasses (fully control over the input and output attachments)
Custom attachments configuration
Fixed Function pipeline configuration for each pass