RustyVulkan

How to read this guide

You don't need any Vulkan, or any Rust, to start. You do need to be comfortable reading code in some language, and to know what a mesh, a texture and a camera are. If you remember OpenGL, even only by reputation, that's a useful starting point, and the guide will keep comparing against it.

The chapter times estimate a prose skim of the whole chapter. Studying the source alongside it will take longer; the overview alone is a shorter first pass. Each chapter has two layers:

• The big picture explains what that part of the renderer does, and why, in plain language and diagrams. If you want the high-level story, read only these sections, in order. They are written to stand on their own.
• Deeper dive walks through the actual source, excerpt by excerpt, with every excerpt labelled with its file and line numbers so you can open it alongside.

Two kinds of side note appear throughout:

The guide explains the code as it is. It is not a build-along tutorial. Where the project's own notes say something is unfinished, the guide says so too. Use the links at each chapter's top to jump between its overview, source walkthrough and recap. At the end of each overview, a link takes you directly to the next overview.

To explore the renderer while reading, follow the setup instructions and run cargo run from the repository root. WASD moves, the mouse looks, U releases the pointer for menus, and Escape quits. The chapters include short observations and optional code experiments; you can read them without running the app.

Credits

The scene uses free assets made by other people, all released under CC0 1.0 (public domain):

• Hut and five rock models by Quaternius, from Poly Pizza.
• The sky panorama, Kloppenheim 05 (Pure Sky) by Greg Zaal, with the pure-sky edit by Jarod Guest, from Poly Haven.

Links to each rock model are in Chapter 12.