NanoRender Engine 🎮🔥

A cross-platform real-time graphics pipeline built with modern C++17

⚙️ Engineered for multi-API rendering across DirectX 12, Vulkan, OpenGL, and Metal

Rendering Immersive Experiences at Scale 🌐

Project Description 🗺️

NanoRender Engine demonstrates unified graphics programming concepts through a single C++ interface that targets DirectX 12, Vulkan, Metal, and OpenGL. The project explores how AAA-quality rendering techniques can be organized, optimized, and delivered across desktop and mobile platforms with a consistent architecture.

Demo:

Screen.Recording.2025-10-17.at.9.53.50.PM.mov

Quickstart 🧭

The snippet below builds the engine and runs the sample application. Copy it into a terminal from the repository root.

cmake -S . -B build                                # Configure the project
cmake --build build                                # Compile library + example
./build/examples/nanorender-example                # Launch the sample app

Expected Output

During cmake --build build you should see compilation progress culminating in:

[100%] Linking CXX executable nanorender-example
[100%] Built target nanorender_example

Running ./build/examples/nanorender-example:

• When GLFW is installed → an 800×600 OpenGL window opens with a cleared background color.
• Without GLFW → console prints Failed to initialize rendering backend: OpenGL backend requires GLFW support but it was not detected. and the app exits cleanly.
• Use W/A/S/D to move, Q/E for vertical motion, and move the mouse to look around (press Esc to release the cursor).
• An ImGui diagnostics overlay appears by default—watch frame time/FPS and toggle the geometry pass.
• Textures now load via stb_image, so you can drop PNG/JPEG assets into assets/textures/ and reference them from the example.
• Static meshes can be imported from OBJ/GLTF files (see assets/models/triangle.gltf) and are cached on load.
• Lighting parameters (direction, color, intensity) and the new off-screen pipeline can be tweaked live from the diagnostics panel.

Prerequisites 📋

• CMake 3.22+
• C++17-compliant compiler (MSVC 2019+, Clang 12+, GCC 11+, Apple Clang)
• GLFW 3.3+
• Vulkan SDK (for Vulkan backend)
• DirectX 12 SDK (for Windows backend)
• Xcode with Metal toolchain (for macOS/iOS backend)
• Python 3 (optional, for tooling scripts)

Frameworks

• C++17 STL
• CMake
• GLFW
• GLM
• DirectX 12
• Vulkan
• OpenGL 4.5+
• Metal

Packages

• SPIRV-Reflect
• Dear ImGui
• JSON for Modern C++

Skills Demonstrated 🖌️

This project applies systems-level rendering expertise to distill modern engine architecture into a portable educational codebase. NanoRender Engine highlights patterns and abstractions inspired by production-grade renderers from studios such as Roblox, Epic, and Unity.

• Core Framework: The Application, Window, and Timer layers coordinate platform services, frame pacing, and lifecycle management using RAII and smart pointers.
• RenderAPI Abstraction: A factory-driven interface instantiates DirectX 12, Vulkan, Metal, or OpenGL backends at runtime, decoupling higher-level systems from platform-specific GPU code.
• Scene & Data Structures: An octree-backed scene graph combines hierarchical transforms, cameras, and spatial partitioning to accelerate frustum culling for large object counts.
• Physically Based Rendering: Cook-Torrance BRDF materials blend metallic, roughness, and albedo inputs while leveraging SIMD-accelerated math for view and light calculations.
• Async Shader Pipeline: std::async-powered compilation composes GLSL, HLSL, and Metal Shading Language into SPIR-V bytecode with reflection data for descriptor binding.
• Post-Processing & Debugging: SSAO and bilateral denoising compute passes share GPU profiling markers with an ImGui overlay for quick iteration and tuning.

Contributing ⚙️

We believe that great knowledge like that which you possess is meant to be shared, and we welcome contributions from fellow geniuses and developers alike. If you have a beneficial or creative code snippet to add or a design improvement to suggest, feel free to fork our repository, make your enhancements, and submit a pull request. Together, let's push real-time graphics forward.

License 🪪

This project is licensed under the MIT License, which means you're free to modify, distribute, and use the code as you see fit. Just remember to attribute the original work to Ariel Tyson's GitHub and keep the aspiring graphics engineer spirit alive!

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