VRez Renderer

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots.

Screenshots of the app.

Workflow

Here is the high-level workflow of the app:

Rendering Features

The renderer is implemented by Vulkan, with GLSL for shaders.

Deferred & Forward Rendering Pipeline

Very basic deferred & forward pipeline.

• Shadow Maps (Depth Only)
  • Render shadow-casting objects to shadow maps
• Deferred Pass (GBuffer + Lighting)
  • Render ever opaque object
  • Render skybox
• Forward Pass
  • Share depth buffer with Deferred Pass
  • Combine deferred buffers and calculate PBR Lighting
  • Render transparent objects (But for simple testing, I only used a opaque Castle, and it looks the same as the deferred rendered one)
• Post Processing
  • FXAA
• ** UI Pass**
  • ImGui UI

Graphics Pipeline

Based Rendering & Image Based Lighting

Inspired by Learn OpenGL, I implemented Physically Based Rendering (PBR) and Image-Based Lighting (IBL) to achieve realistic rendering results.

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing

Based on NVIDIA FXAA - TIMOTHY LOTTES, I integrated FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing) into my renderer, achieving a fast and visually pleasing anti-aliasing effect.

Other Features

Thread Pool

To improve loading performance, I implemented a thread pool to handle parallelized asset loading. This allows multiple assets (such as textures, meshes, and shaders) to load concurrently, reducing startup time and improving responsiveness.

Below is a snippet of the critical part of the worker thread logic:

void ThreadPool::Worker() {
    while (true) {
        std::function<void()> job;
        {
            std::unique_lock lock(m_mutex);
            // Wait for an available task
            m_cv.wait(lock, [this]() { return !m_tasks.empty() || m_stopped; });

            // Exit when
            // 1) Thread pool is shutting down and all tasks are finished
            // 2) Explicitly asked to stop
            if (m_stopped && m_tasks.empty()) {
                return;
            }

            // Fetch one task
            job = std::move(m_tasks.front());
            m_tasks.pop();
        }

        job();

        m_pendingTasks.fetch_sub(1, std::memory_order::memory_order_acq_rel);
        if (m_pendingTasks.load(std::memory_order_relaxed) == 0) {
            m_idleCv.notify_all();
        }
    }
}

Shader System

I implemented a runtime GLSL-to-SPIR-V compilation system using glslang. And I also integrated shader reflection with SPIRV-Reflect, allowing the engine to automatically extract descriptor bindings and push constants.

To Improve

During development, I identified several areas for improvement:

• The current logging system uses SDL_Log, which could be replaced with a more structured and formatted logging framework.
• Vulkan objects currently require manual destruction. This approach is error-prone, and adopting a resource management pattern (such as reference counting or RAII wrappers) would make the system safer and more maintainable.

I am addressing these issues and exploring improved designs in my next project, VRez-RT.