As announced in a previous post, I've made progress on the rendering pipeline. The SceneGraph and RenderPass system are in place now, separating scene graph traversal from the actual rendering commands.
The first abstractions for the rendering model have found their way into helios, and the first example application has already rendered its first primitives onto the screen (aka the Hello World! of 3D Computer Graphics).
de Vries' book on OpenGL is proving (once again) to be very useful, as it provides some common, coarse-grained abstractions that serve as a great starting point for further refinement. Think of separating concerns like Meshes, Materials, and Shaders.
I feel that I've spent most of my recent time with refactoring, restructuring, and developing throwaway prototypes that get discarded every weekend - and that's a good thing. The time between development cycles is currently filled with the intense evaluation of algorithms in digital image processing and reading through Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory, which repeatedly provides me with new perspectives.
Continuing from my article on Model Matrix Rotations, I've written about projection matrices - one of the final steps before rasterization.
main() serves as a great example of yesterday's restructuring in practice: The OpenGLDevice is created, then passed to a GLFWApplication which manages window creation and the main loop. The ultimate goal is for the application to own and provide the input system, further simplifying the program's entry point and properly encapsulating platform-specific details within the appropriate module.
The last few days have seen some restructuring in the helios codebase, with namespaces and modules being reorganized. This was mainly driven by a clearer definition of responsibilities for individual classes, which can now be better refined as the implementation progresses.
From Vertex to MeshData to device-specific Meshes - over the weekend, I took a sidestep from the math lib to focus on the architectural planning and development of the underlying rendering layer, accompanied by the scene layer that is responsible for abstracting scene graphs away from the actual rendering process.
helios now has core vector operations: subtraction, dot product, cross product. The lookAt function constructs view matrices from eye, target, and up vectors, following standard methodology.
Following up on my article on Model Matrices, I've written about matrix composition in the context of Model and Rotation matrices.
translate, rotate, scale - done. They now live in helios.math.transform.
I standardized on post-multiplication (M' = M * T) to stay consistent with glm. Transformations are applied in local space.