Render Lab

A Vulkan rendering engine in C#/.NET 9, built as a public learning journey. Each demo in this repo corresponds to a blog post on functionalrenderinglab.dev that walks through the technique it implements.

The architecture follows Functional Core / Imperative Shell: the render-graph compiler, scene types, and UI reducers are pure and unit-tested without a GPU; all Vulkan calls are confined to a single mutable kernel (GpuState) behind a thin shell.

Status

The engine is mid-roadmap. M0–M3 (triangle → G-Buffer → deferred shading) are complete; M4 (basic lighting) and M5 (first paper: SSAO) are in progress. See RenderLab-PRD.md for the full milestone plan and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the module graph and per-frame data flow.

Prerequisites

• .NET 9 SDK
• A Vulkan-capable GPU and up-to-date drivers
• Vulkan SDK — provides glslc for shader compilation and the validation layers
• Python 3 — invoked by compile_shaders.py to drive glslc

Targeted platforms: Windows and Linux on Vulkan 1.3.

Build

# Compile GLSL shaders to SPIR-V (run once, and after any shader edit)
python src/RenderLab.Shaders/compile_shaders.py

# Build the solution
dotnet build code.sln

Run a demo

Demos are selected by CLI argument to RenderLab.App:

dotnet run --project src/RenderLab.App -- <demo>

Demo	Command	What it shows
Triangle	dotnet run --project src/RenderLab.App -- triangle	Minimal Vulkan pipeline — the "hello world" of the engine
G-Buffer	dotnet run --project src/RenderLab.App -- gbuffer	Geometry pass writing position, normal, and albedo targets
Deferred	dotnet run --project src/RenderLab.App -- deferred	Full deferred shading pipeline with Blinn-Phong lighting (default)

Running with no argument launches the deferred demo. The rationale for the per-article demo split is in docs/DEMO-ARCHITECTURE.md.

Run tests

The pure modules (RenderLab.Graph, RenderLab.Scene, RenderLab.Ui, RenderLab.Functional) are fully tested without a GPU:

dotnet test code.sln

Repository layout

• src/RenderLab.App/ — CLI dispatcher and per-article demo classes (Demos/)
• src/RenderLab.Gpu/ — the only assembly that calls Silk.NET Vulkan
• src/RenderLab.Graph/, RenderLab.Scene/, RenderLab.Ui/, RenderLab.Functional/ — pure modules
• src/RenderLab.Papers/ — pass modules (G-Buffer, deferred lighting, tonemap, debug viz)
• src/RenderLab.Shaders/ — GLSL sources + SPIR-V build script
• docs/ — architecture, documentation rules, paper-implementation guide
• tests/ — unit tests for the pure modules

Further reading

• RenderLab-PRD.md — goals, non-goals, milestones, design decisions
• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — module graph, purity boundary, data flow
• docs/ADDING-A-PAPER.md — how to implement a paper against the engine
• docs/DEMO-ARCHITECTURE.md — why each blog post gets its own demo class
• docs/QOL-STRATEGY.md — debug tooling and the iteration loop
• docs/DOCUMENTATION-RULES.md — conventions for docs/*.md and XML <summary>

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.