Charlie3D

Mirrors: git.lesleylai.info | Codeberg

Charlie 3D is my personal R&D rendering framework in Vulkan. It is constructed on top of my beyond-core library.

It is designed as a modular rendering playground. Reusable modules living in /engine. Those modules can be pulled into any projects under /projects.

Features

Main Features

• Render Graph: automatic barrier placement and pass reordering
• Shader hot reloading: Set up shader modules and pipeline like normal and shader files will be automatically watched for changes.

Vulkan-related

• Vulkan helpers that simplifies object creation and debug name setting

Rendering

• Shadow mapping with Percentage-Closer Filtering (PCF) and Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS)
• Normal map and occlusion map support
• Reverse-Z for better precision
• A simple immediate mode debug renderer

Asset

• GLTF and Obj file loading: Wrapping around tinyobjloader and fastgltf

Interactions

• A versatile camera implementation that support both arcball and first-person control
• Dear Imgui integration

Utilities

• Tracy Profiler integration

Projects

Charlie 3D comes with multiple projects sharing its shared abstractions.

Project	Info	Screenshot
Model Viewer	The "main" project of Charlie 3D. Showcases a GLTF model viewer with various features
Compute Drawing	Interactive rendering with compute shader. Can be useful starting point
Compute Toy	A simple ShaderToy clone using compute shader
vk_mini_path_tracer	Me implementing vk_mini_path_tracer

Build Instruction

Important

This project uses git-submodules. And it also uses git-lfs for asset management. Please follow the setup instructions carefully to ensure everything is initialized correctly.

Install git-lfs if you haven't

If you haven't done this before, make sure to install git-lfs and run git lfs install before cloning the repository to ensure all large assets are correctly downloaded.

If you've already cloned the repository without git-lfs, then install it and run:

git lfs fetch --all
git lfs pull

to download the missing assets.

Install vcpkg

If you haven’t already installed vcpkg. Goto a new directory where you want to install vcpkg, and do:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
./vcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh  # or bootstrap-vcpkg.bat on Windows

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/LesleyLai/Charlie3D.git --recurse-submodules
cd Charlie3D

If you forget the --recurse-submodules argument, do

git submodule update --init --recursive

Configure CMake and Build

At this point, you can either use your IDE’s CMake integration or run the following commands from the terminal. The key is to provide the vcpkg toolchain file to CMake:

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
cmake --build build

Tip

Replace /path/to/vcpkg with the actual path to the local vcpkg installation.