How to simulate particles

Since Vulkan was not only designed for rendering but for compute tasks as well, the following guide will focus on this. For this task the guide will show you how to simulate and render particles because this is something a GPU can do extremely well. Each particle can potentially be simulated in parallel via a compute shader.

The rendering of each particle will not be included in detail with all shaders but the guide should give you a good idea how to do it yourself. So these are the individual steps of this guide:

You can also find the whole list of steps in the overview page of this blog and this here is a first visual hint what the goal of this guide could be: 

Previous

Next

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction

About This blog will teach you about the basic usage of the VkCV framework . The VkCV is a framework designed and built by students from the University Koblenz for computer graphics. Technically the framework is built with Vulkan and allows to utilize the Vulkan API on top of the framework in case you need certain features. However, the tutorials on this blog focus on the core API of the framework itself by going through different examples of increasing complexity. So you will learn how to develop with that instead. The tutorials do not require any prior knowledge of Direct3D , OpenGL , Metal or Vulkan . But the basics of 3D computer graphics won't be covered in detail. So it will help to get this knowledge from other sources. Also in some cases the VkCV framework utilizes certain concepts of the Vulkan API to reduce the cost of abstraction. In those cases the tutorials will explain those concepts out of necessity. Just don't expect a full detailed guide about Vulkan.
Read more

Application development

Environment The main purpose of the VkCV framework is to ease application development. But how would you start once your IDE is all setup? First of all, here is the general directory structure of the framework and what the specific folders contain: config/ - CMake configuration and custom functions for the build process doc/ - All sorts of documentation include/ - The headers of the VkCV framework API lib/ - The dependencies of the framework as submodules modules/ - All current modules provided by the framework itself projects - The example application using the framework and its modules resources/ - The list with the recommended extensions for example scripts/ - Useful shell/bash scripts to interact with the command line src/ - The source code of the framework Generation As you might have noticed the subdirectory called "projects" contains all example applications and it is easiest to create a new application in there integrated
Read more

First setup

Cloning the repository One of the first things you will need is Git with the large file storage extension installed. So on most Linux distributions you can get git and git-lfs from your distributions repository. On Windows you should get Git with a basic shell from here and the newest release of git-lfs from here . When both is installed you will need to run the following command in the shell (for example Git Bash on Windows) once: git lfs install Then you can clone the official repository with all required submodules from the shell as following: git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.uni-koblenz.de/vulkan2021/vkcv-framework.git Building the framework Now you should have all required dependencies to build the framework from source except the Vulkan headers. Those headers can be installed via the VulkanSDK . On Linux distributions you should also get those headers from the distributions repository though. To build the framework from source you will need
Read more