Sharing the results of nearly 3 months of work on VKEngine, built with Vulkan, C++ 20, and many great third-party libraries. 

# Current Features:

* **3D Model and Texture Loading**
* Load and render 3D models (OBJ) with associated textures (Diffuse & Normal).
* **Skybox Rendering**
* Support for panoramic backgrounds and environment visuals.
* **Environment Mapping with Fresnel Reflections**
* Realistic reflective materials that respond to viewing angles.
* **MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing)**
* Smooths jagged edges for improved visual quality.
* **Extensive Transparency Support** *(Alpha Test, Optimized Alpha-to-Coverage (A2C), Alpha Blend)*
* Supports both cutout materials (e.g., grass, foliage) and blended transparency (e.g., glass, windows). Shadows use the naive alpha-test, opaque objects use A2C with sharpening and falloff prevention, true transparent objects are blended in a separate pass.
* **Dynamic Lighting System** *(Directional & Point Lights)*
* Real-time lighting with multiple light types.
* **Blinn-Phong Shading Model**
* Classic, efficient lighting model for realistic highlights.
* **Fully Controllable 3D Camera**
* Free movement and orientation for interactive scenes.
* **ImGui-Based Editor Interface**
* Integrated in-engine editor for debugging and scene control.
* **Swapchain Recreation Handling**
* Robust handling of window resize and minimization.
* **Mipmap Generation**
* Automatic mipmap creation for texture quality and performance.
* **Instanced Rendering**
* Efficiently render large numbers of identical objects.
* **Material Batching**
* Batch draw calls on a per-material basis to reduce the number of state changes needed in the render loop.
* **Animations**
* Update an object's model matrix in real-time to translate, rotate and scale any object.
* **Light Casters**
* A small cube mesh that tracks the positions of a point light, making placing lights easy.
* **Bindless Textures**
* Uses descriptor indexing to give shaders direct access to large arrays of textures, eliminating the need to bind textures individually per draw call.
* **Frustum Culling**
* High-performance visibility culling using multithreading, SIMD intrinsics & fast AABB transformations to massively improve rendering efficiency.
* **3D Audio**
* Easy to use 2D and 3D Audio API provided by the SoLoud library.
* **AABB Debug Visualizations**
* View Mesh-level and Submesh-level bounding boxes in real-time directly in the engine.
* **MikkTSpace Normal Mapping**
* Industry-standard tangent space calculation for accurate surface detail rendering.
* **Cascaded Shadow Maps**
* High-quality directional light shadows with multiple cascades for ultra high quality detail where it matters most.

V1 Release Showcase of my Vulkan Engine