Diligent Samples Documentation

Diligent Samples is a collection of tutorials and sample applications designed to demonstrate the usage of the Diligent Engine.

This module depends on the following submodules:

• Core
• Tools
• FX

It provides practical examples ranging from basic triangle rendering to advanced topics like Ray Tracing, Bindless Resources, and Compute Shaders.

Order-Independent Transparency (OIT) is a set of techniques used to render transparent objects without requiring them to be sorted by depth. Standard alpha-blending is non-commutative, meaning the rendering order affects the final pixel color. While depth-sorting objects is a common workaround, it fails when objects intersect, are nested, or have complex self-overlapping geometry. OIT methods allow these objects to be rendered in any order while maintaining visual correctness.

This tutorial demonstrates three specific approaches:

1. Unsorted alpha-blending: A baseline method used to demonstrate the visual artifacts that occur when sorting is omitted.
2. Weighted-blended OIT: An efficient approximation that assigns weights to surfaces based on depth and transparency.
3. Layered OIT: A more advanced approach for handling transparency layers.

The Nuklear Demo sample demonstrates how to integrate the nuklear immediate-mode UI library with the Diligent engine.

Platform Limitation: Note that input event handling for this specific sample is only implemented for the Win32 platform.

A Geometry Shader is a programmable stage that resides between the vertex shader and the pixel shader (or between the domain shader and pixel shader when using hardware tessellation). Unlike vertex shaders which process individual vertices, the geometry shader operates on full primitives (e.g., entire triangles).

In this tutorial, the geometry shader is used to render a smooth wireframe by:

1. Computing the triangle area.
2. Determining the distance from every vertex to its opposite edge.
3. Passing these distances to the pixel shader via interpolation, allowing the pixel shader to compute the distance to the closest edge and render a line based on that distance.

[maxvertexcount(3)]
void main(triangle VSOutput In[3], 
          inout TriangleStream<GSOutput> triStream )
{
    // ... logic to compute area and distances to edges ...
    triStream.Append( Out );
}