Designing a Modern Rendering Engine - Design Decisions and Implementation Details

The development of real-time rendering applications has become one of the most difficult software engineering areas due to the number and complexity of the needed techniques and algorithms involved. These software projects have in common that they need to structure the data in the main memory, process it and send it to the graphics device for rendering in an efficient way. These recurring and complex algorithms are provided by so called rendering engines to allow faster development of real-time rendering applications. This book describes the concepts and design decisions which form the basis for the development of the rendering engine presented in this document. Detailed information is provided on the interface to the graphics device, a novel effect framework and the implemented graph structures allowing efficient data traversal. This book is intended for software engineers and software architects in the field of graphics- and game programming.