Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
V
3D Engine Design
Welcome to the 3D Engine Design section of this edition of
GPU Pro
.The
selection of chapters you will find here covers a range of engine design problems.
First, Peter Sikachev, Vladimir Egorov, and Sergey Makeev share their expe-
rience using quaternions in an MMORPG game engine. Their chapter, “Quater-
nions Revisited,” illustrates the use of quaternions for multiple purposes in or-
der to replace bulky 3
3 rotation and tangent space matrices throughout the
entire engine, most notably affecting aspects such as normal mapping, generic
transforms, instancing, skinning, and morph targets. The chapter shows the
performance and memory savings attributable to the authors' findings.
Second, Fabrice Robinet, Remi Arnaud, Tony Parisi, and Patrick Cozzi present
the chapter “glTF: Designing an Open-Standard Runtime Asset Format.” This
chapter introduces work by the COLLADA Working Group in the Khronos Group
to provide a bridge between interchange asset formats and the OpenGL-based
runtime graphics APIs (e.g., WebGL and OpenGL ES). The design of the glTF
open-standard transmission-format is described, along with open-source content
pipeline tools involved in converting COLLADA to glTF and REST-based cloud
services.
Finally, Bartosz Chodorowski and Wojciech Sterna present the chapter “Man-
aging Transformations in Hierarchy,” which provides a study on this basic 3D en-
gine component. In addition to presenting the theory, it describes and addresses
some of the issues found in common implementations of the transformation hier-
archy system. It also describes how to achieve some useful operations within this
system such as re-parenting nodes and global positioning.
I hope you enjoy this edition's selections, and I hope you find these chapters
inspiring and enlightening to your rendering and engine development work.
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—Wessam Bahnassi
