3D Rendering Engine (OpenGL)

A real-time 3D rendering engine written in C++ with modern OpenGL and GLSL, built from scratch without a scene-graph or model-loading library. It implements its own OBJ/MTL parsing, GPU buffer management, a programmable Phong-style lighting pipeline, and skybox environment mapping — the full path from a mesh file on disk to a shaded frame on screen.

This was a self-directed project to understand the rendering pipeline at the level of explicit GPU state and buffer management, rather than through a game engine's abstractions.

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Features

• Custom OBJ/MTL parser (no external model-loading libraries)
• Texture mapping with material support (map_Kd)
• Multi-light additive shading (Directional, Point, Spot)
• Skybox / environment mapping
• MVP (Model-View-Projection) transformation pipeline
• Real-time rendering using VAO/VBO
• Programmable shader pipeline (GLSL)
• Runtime polygon-mode switching (point / wireframe / fill) for pipeline inspection

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Rendering Pipeline

1. Load OBJ/MTL files using a custom parser
2. Normalize vertex geometry
3. Upload vertex data to GPU using VAO/VBO
4. Apply MVP matrix transformations
5. Render the skybox, then the scene, with per-fragment lighting and texture sampling in GLSL

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Technical Highlights

• Implemented custom OBJ/MTL loader without third-party libraries
• Designed full OpenGL rendering pipeline, including skybox/environment mapping
• Implemented multi-light Phong-style shading model in GLSL
• Managed GPU buffers (VAO/VBO) and heap-allocated scene objects explicitly, with deterministic cleanup on exit — no reliance on a framework's lifecycle management
• Applied MVP matrix transformations for 3D scene control

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Controls

• W / A / S / D — move the spot light
• Arrow Keys — move the point light
• F1 / F2 / F3 — switch polygon mode: point / wireframe / fill
• Esc — release all allocated resources and exit

Tech Stack

• C++
• OpenGL
• GLSL
• GLEW
• FreeGLUT
• GLM

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Build Instructions

This project was developed using Visual Studio 2022 (Windows).

Requirements:

• OpenGL
• GLEW
• FreeGLUT
• GLM

Open the project in Visual Studio and ensure all dependencies are correctly configured before building.