Textures and materials in Vulkan
Entry posted by Josh ·
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I now have different materials with textures working in Vulkan. The API allows us to access every loaded texture in any shader, although some Intel chips have limitations and will require a fallback. This is interesting because some of our design decisions in Leadwerks 4 were made because we had a limit of 16 textures a shader could access. Terrain clipmaps were a good solution to this problem, but since the same limitations no longer exist it may be time to revisit this design. We could, for example, implement a shader that can access any loaded texture and use a single RGBA texture to indicate which texture should be used for each terrain point. This would allow up to 256 different layers. Best of all, the number of texture layers would have no effect on speed. It would run the same speed no matter how many textures you use. In fact the whole idea of "layers" is obsolete and not descriptive at all of what is happening. This would also eliminate the blurriness and weird filtering that can occur with clipmaps, and give us pixel-perfect terrain at any distance.
An application has been uploaded for beta subscribers which will load and display any Leadwerks map with the new Vulkan renderer:
Our new lighting system will work seamlessly with Vulkan. However, before I continue with lighting I want to resolve some problems in the current scope of the renderer. I've worked out a huge piece of the core renderer design now, and I think things will get easier soon.
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