Project Type

Vulkan Renderer

Team Size

1 Person

Roles

Graphics Programmer

Platform

Windows

Duration

46 Days

Find the code on

VRenderer is my first attempt at writing a Vulkan Renderer.

VRenderer began as a self-study project in my third year of University. I had just finished my summer internship at Traverse Research, and my Team at University and I started working on a VR Game in Unreal Engine. While that was fun, I missed working with an actual Graphics API. Thus, I started using the self-study time at university to learn how to use Vulkan and, hopefully, have a functioning renderer. I worked on it every Friday, and it has been a delightful, though difficult, experience.

Features

Planned Features

Main Features

Model Rendering

Particle System in Compute Shaders

You can use the Renderer to load and render .obj files. It has a variety of features, including texturing, depth buffering, in-flight synchronisation, and MSAA. To make usage simpler, I offer a generic buffer class, as well as more specialised Buffer Classes such as Vertex Buffers. I also provide my own Device, Image, Model, SwapChain, and Texture classes.

Recently, I implemented Compute Shader support on a separate Compute Shader branch. I decided to follow the example provided on vulkan-tutorial.com and created a particle system that is fully updated using the compute pipeline. After that, the Graphics Pipeline takes these particles and draws them during the render pass.

What I learned

I took the initiative to learn Vulkan from scratch. Initially, I aimed to grasp the fundamentals, such as how to display a triangle on the screen. Subsequently, I set my sights on developing my own basic Vulkan Renderer as a Self-Study objective for my entire third year at University. Every Friday (Self-Study-day), I worked on this project.

I loosely followed the guide at vulkan-tutorial.com, but I did not want to mindlessly mimic it. Therefore, I decided to do two things: First, I would create my own renderer with my own classes and utilise the tutorial only to learn the concepts I needed. Second, I documented everything I learned in my own words via PowerPoint presentations to ensure my comprehension of these concepts.

During this time, I learned a lot about how Vulkan works. I learned about

Creating a Vulkan instance
Selecting physical and creating logical devices
Queue Families (Graphics & Compute)
The Swap Chain in Vulkan
Image Views
Image Objects
Image Samplers
The Graphics & Compute Pipeline
Shader Modules
Render Pipelines
Frame Buffers
The Command Buffer & Command Pools
Synchronization Objects (Semaphores and Fences)
In-Flight Frame Synchronization
Buffers and how to create them (Input descriptions, allocating memory, staging buffers, uniform buffers, vertex buffers, index buffers, shader storage buffers etc.)
Descriptors, including Descriptor Set Layouts, Descriptor Sets &Descriptor Pools
Layout Transitions
Depth Buffering
MipMap Generation
Multisampling
Reading and Writing from and to Buffers on the GPU (Shader Storage Buffers & Storage Images)
The Compute Shader Stage & Compute Space (e.g. Work Groups & Invocations)

Find Everything I learned below

Vulkan Triangle

Vertex Buffers

Vulkan Texturing

Compute Shaders