ASH Renderer

A production-quality Vulkan renderer built with ASH (Vulkan bindings) and VMA (GPU memory allocator).

ECS-free, pure rendering engine - decoupled camera and input handling, ready for any game engine.

Features

• 🎨 PBR Materials - Physically-based rendering with metallic/roughness workflow
• 🌑 Shadow Mapping - Cascaded shadow maps with PCF filtering
• ✨ Post-Processing - Bloom, tonemapping, and temporal anti-aliasing
• 📊 GPU Profiling - Built-in timing queries and performance diagnostics
• 🔌 Feature System - Extensible plugin architecture for rendering features
• 🚀 High Performance - 60+ FPS @ 1080p with 1000+ objects
• 🔧 LOD System - Automatic level-of-detail management
• ⚡ GPU Instancing - Efficient batch rendering
• 👁️ Occlusion Culling - GPU-accelerated visibility testing
• 🔄 Hot Reloading - Automatic shader recompilation and pipeline recreation on file change
• 🛡️ Robust Validation - GPU-assisted validation with automatic fallback (VK_EXT_validation_features)
• 🍃 Alpha Testing - Support for transparent shadows (e.g. foliage)
• 💡 Light Culling - Tiled/clustered forward rendering
• 📦 Bindless Textures - Efficient bindless texture management (1024+ textures)
• 🖥️ Headless Support - Decoupled rendering via SurfaceProvider trait (CI/Benchmark ready)

Quick Start

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]

ash_renderer = "0.3.2"

glam = "0.30" # Required for math types

Basic Usage

use ash_renderer::prelude::*;
use glam::{Mat4, Vec3};
use ash_renderer::prelude::*;
use glam::{Mat4, Vec3};
// use winit::window::Window; // Assumed available from context

// 1. Initialization (inside your winit event loop)
// Wraps the window to provide a Vulkan surface
let surface_provider = ash_renderer::vulkan::WindowSurfaceProvider::new(&window);

// Renderer::new handles Vulkan instance, device, and swapchain creation.
let mut renderer = Renderer::new(&surface_provider)?;

// 2. Resource Setup
// Create a built-in primitive mesh
let cube = Mesh::create_cube();

// Define PBR material properties
let material = Material {
    color: [1.0, 0.5, 0.2, 1.0], // RGBA
    metallic: 0.5,
    roughness: 0.3,
    ..Default::default()
};

// Assign resources to the renderer
renderer.set_mesh(cube);
*renderer.material_mut() = material;

// 3. Render Loop (e.g., inside RedrawRequested)
let aspect_ratio = width as f32 / height as f32;

// Camera Setup
let camera_pos = Vec3::new(0.0, 2.0, 5.0);
let target = Vec3::ZERO;
let view = Mat4::look_at_rh(camera_pos, target, Vec3::Y);

// Projection Setup (Note: Vulkan requires Y-flip)
let mut proj = Mat4::perspective_rh(45.0_f32.to_radians(), aspect_ratio, 0.1, 100.0);
proj.y_axis.y *= -1.0; 

// Render the frame with the current camera state
renderer.render_frame(view, proj, camera_pos)?;

// 4. Resize Handling
// Call this when the window is resized to recreate the swapchain
renderer.request_swapchain_resize(ash::vk::Extent2D {
    width: new_size.width,
    height: new_size.height,
});

Mesh Creation

// Built-in primitives
let cube = Mesh::create_cube();
let sphere = Mesh::create_sphere(32, 16);
let plane = Mesh::create_plane();

// Custom mesh
let mesh = Mesh::new(vertices, indices);

Materials

let material = Material {
    color: [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0],      // Base color (RGBA)
    metallic: 0.0,                     // 0.0 = dielectric, 1.0 = metal
    roughness: 0.5,                    // 0.0 = smooth, 1.0 = rough
    emissive: [0.0, 0.0, 0.0],        // Emission color
    ..Default::default()
};

Examples

Run the provided examples to see the renderer in action:

# Simple triangle

cargo run --example 01_triangle


# Textured cube with materials (Basic Usage)

cargo run --example 02_cube


# GLTF model loading

cargo run --example 03_model_loading --features gltf_loading

Architecture

ash_renderer/
├── src/
│   ├── vulkan/          # Low-level Vulkan abstractions
│   │   ├── device.rs    # Logical device management
│   │   ├── pipeline.rs  # Graphics/compute pipelines
│   │   ├── shader.rs    # Shader loading & reflection
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── renderer/        # High-level rendering API
│   │   ├── renderer.rs  # Main Renderer struct
│   │   ├── resources/   # GPU resources (mesh, texture, material)
│   │   ├── features/    # Extensible feature system
│   │   └── diagnostics/ # Profiling & debugging
│   └── shaders/         # GLSL shader sources
└── examples/            # Usage examples

Performance

Feature Flags

Requirements

• Rust: 1.70+
• Vulkan: 1.2+ capable GPU
• Vulkan SDK: For validation layers (optional)

Author

Saptak Santra

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for details.

Made with ❤️ and Vulkan