Preface

The 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook is your one-stop-shop practical guide to learning modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using the C++ programming language and APIs such as OpenGL and Vulkan. Starting with the configuration of your OpenGL and Vulkan development environment, you will immerse yourself in various common graphics development aspects, including shader development and handling geometrical data, among others. Going further, the book delves into building a 3D rendering engine, guiding you step by step through a number of small yet self-contained recipes. After each recipe, you will be able to incrementally add features to your code base while learning how to integrate numerous possible 3D graphics methods and algorithms into one big project. The book dives deep into the discussion of the relevant graphics techniques, such as physically-based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. You will be introduced to common techniques and solutions when dealing with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering and will apply optimization techniques to build high-performance and feature-rich graphics applications. By the end of this book, you will be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks, and have a solid understanding of best practices in modern graphics API programming.

This book is about rendering and will be focusing on modern, real-time, GPU-accelerated rendering techniques rather than on just one specific graphics API. Nonetheless, we will use the latest version of OpenGL, a programming interface for creating real-time 3D graphics, with a flavor of the Approaching Zero Driver Overheads philosophy. Some parallels with Vulkan will be drawn to demonstrate the differences between these two APIs and how all the rendering concepts and techniques discussed in the book can be implemented using both programming interfaces.