Projects and products
Projects and products
After years without updates I'm glad to present probably the most important update so far. In the past, the framework was just a monolith of C++ static libraries that could be enterely or partially included within a project to access various functionalities. On one hand it was good, because it simplified the programming of the […]
I created a video to show the potential of the Vulkan renderer included in my framework. Now the engine can import 3D models from several 3D formats (including collada) and render them with Vulkan libraries. The engine is equipped with a proprietary material system and mesh format. The materials of the imported models are converted […]
Now the engine in Vulkan can draw text with bitmap rendering. The engine checks which characters are on the screen and it creates dynamically the textures only for the fonts to be drawn, with the correct size and aspect. The characters are precalculated into bitmap with the FreeType library and loaded into Vulkan textures only […]
Skinned mesh rendering is a fundamental part of every modern 3D engine, so I couldn't avoid to implement it. The skinned mesh with weights, indices, bones, skeleton, and animated nodes is imported with AssImp library into my format. I added weights and indices to the vertex attributes while bones matrices are written into a shader […]
I improved the material system, introducing the lighting stage. I removed the fragment stage and replaced it with color and lighting stage. The output color is calculated as the sum of the color stage and the lighting stage. The color stage has only one material node as input that is used to produce the output […]
Now the importer with AssImp library is capable to import model materials and textures into my format. I added also support for normal maps with tangent and bitangent vertex attributes, improving the lighting stage in the fragment shader to render it properly. In the video you can see nano suit model imported from collada format. […]
I decided to use AssImp library to import models from other formats to my 3D mesh format. The video shows a first implementation of the importer. Vertices and normals are converted along the skeleton structure, while the red material is generated just to render the model on the screen. The next step is to load […]
Finally, the very first 3D model rendered by the 3D engine. Even if it looks like a simple torus demo, the main feature this time is the format used for the 3D mesh and the convertion from material nodes to vulkan shader, for the rendering. The mesh is composed by a polygon hull, a set […]
I improved the implementation of materials and textures with Vulkan. Now every material is translated into a GLSL shader that is converted into SPIRV code with shaderc library. The shader is generated along the graphics pipeline to match the material settings. For now materials are very simple and used to draw an image texture with […]
I am happy to announce that Vulkan library has finally been integrated into my framework. For the moment nothing complicated, I limited myself to implement a specialization of the Graphics Context that draws simple colored rectangles instead of the images drawn by Cairo library. It's possible to invoke drawing commands with the same degree of […]
Finally I came to a first working version of the 2D GUI based on the Cairo libraries. The entire GUI architecture is based on 2D Engine components like the graphics and the physics engines. The graphics engine makes use of graphics context that in this implementation is based on Cairo, but it can be specialized […]
Having a graphics context to draw something on the screen is not enough when you have to deal with complex scenes made of many textures, materials, shapes and assets of any kind. This is the reason why at some point of my framework development I introduced the concepts of Scene, Engine and Resources. Basically, a […]
In my framework, I implemented materials for being extremely scalable. First of all, I decided to abandon the old format similar to 3D Studio Max or Maxon Cinema 4D and adopt another format more similar to UE4 that is based on Visual Expression Nodes, where one node in this case is called "material component". A […]
I implemented a set of classed to handle system windows and events. Now it's possible to open a window and draw an image inside. I also programmed an abstract class for graphics context to handle graphics functionality in common with the most important graphics libraries, like DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan, even if the first specialization […]
One of the most important component in a framework is a cross-platform loader of dynamic libraries. Without it, you cannot access to the functionality of external dynamic libraries like OpenGL, DirectX or Vulkan, or at least you may have to add extra code for every library on every platform you have to support. In some […]