An implementation of the simple renderer described in howtovulkan but in Rust and GLSL (vs C++ and Slang), with a number of tweaks made as a result (+ Cel shading!).
In other words, howtovulkan-rs is a demo program using Vulkan to render single objects to a winit surface, with basic view controls. See keybinds.
- GLSL instead of Slang (and thus a UBO is used instead of a push constant for sending extra data to the vertex shader)
- Cel Shading :3
- Outlines drawn with a thick wireframe pipeline for backfaces behind a normal polygon-fill pipeline for front faces
- Quantised Phong lighting
- Left and right arrow to change model selection (indicated by increased brightness)
- Hold left click and pan up and down to rotate the selected model
- Zoom in and out by scrolling or using -/= keys (if, say, trackpad scrolling is not registering)
- Increase and decrease the shininess of the model material with 9/0 keys
- Quit the program by pressing Q
howtovulkan-rs uses ash, providing direct (almost) bindings to Vulkan.
vk_format, gl_format, and extra_ktx contain constants and lookup functions for formats from libktx, as at time of writing, there are no maintained Rust crates providing bindings or either full support for the KTX format.
No generative AI was used in the writing of howtovulkan-rs.
See releases for a tarball containing an appimage and folders containing model and shader files.
howtovulkan-rs has been tested as an appimage natively on Arch Linux with Intel integrated graphics (UHD Graphics 620), NixOS (26.11, nixpkgs-unstable), with a discrete AMD GPU (rx 6800), and a Linux Mint virtual machine (Linux Mint 22.3).
Run the appimage in the same directory as the model and shader directories. See keybinds.
Running the appimage only requires Vulkan drivers to be installed (e.g. vulkan-intel or vulkan-radeon on Arch), which most systems should already have. The Vulkan loader (vulkan-icd-loader on Arch) is technically also required, but is often installed automatically alongside any Vulkan driver.
howtovulkan-rs can be built and run with cargo. The no-layers feature is provided for non-development builds which do not require the Vulkan validation layers to be installed. Note that release mode results in strange behaviour and crashing.
Build with either cargo build or cargo build --features no-layers for systems without the Vulkan validation layers.
Building requires cargo, as well as shaderc (if shaderc is not installed, cmake is required ahd shaderc with be built when compiling howtovulkan-rs).
Running using cargo has the same requirements as running the appimage.
A packaging script is provided as a convenient means of producing a new appimage, and has the same requirements as building.