COMPUTER GRAPHICS
The last topic I studied at AIE was computer graphics. In this subject we learned how to use OpenGL and the GLSL shading language. During this subject, I undertook learning and implementing many different rendering techniques, including forward rendering, deferred rendering, Physically Based Rendering and many more subjects.
The bootstrap library implements a deferred renderer which runs three different stages. The first stage involves rendering all meshes and particles to the GBuffer. The lighting pass utilizes the updated buffers from the geometry pass, which is then combined the post process pass.
Small features have also been implemented, these include both CPU and GPU based particle systems. The GPU based system utlizes compute and geometry shaders to run, with the example project capable of emitting and simulating over 1 million particles (1056784 exactly, or 1028 * 1028).
Shaders in this library can also include other shader files. This is used commonly for accessing uniform buffers which are used for storing the camera and lighting data. This allows for both easy implementation of new shaders and quick access to data commonly used in most shaders. To include another shader, you would simply include it similar including a header file in C++.
A small text batch renderer is also available for printing strings to screen. The batch method was chosen for efficient rendering of text by using a font atlas constructed by the RectangleBinPack algorithm. The text is drawn last, so it appears on top of everything else with no post processing applied.
Position Buffer
Color Buffer
Normal Buffer
Lighting Buffer
