Implementing computed meshes in Vulkan
In the Initializing compute shaders in Vulkan recipe, we learned how to initialize the compute pipeline in Vulkan. We are going to need it in this chapter to implement a BRDF precomputation tool for our PBR pipeline. But before that, let's learn a few simple and interesting ways to use compute shaders in Vulkan and combine this feature with mesh geometry generation on the GPU.
We are going to run a compute shader to create triangulated geometry of a three-dimensional (3D) torus knot shape with different P
and Q
parameters.
Important note
A torus knot is a special kind of knot that lies on the surface of an unknotted torus in 3D space. Each torus knot is specified by a pair of p
and q
coprime integers. You can read more on this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus_knot.
The data produced by the compute shader is stored in a shader storage buffer and used in a vertex shader in a typical programmable-vertex-fetch way. To make the...