ImGui Vulkan Application

This is a personal reference for getting started with Vulkan and ImGui (using the Vulkan backend). The code is heavily annotated for learning purposes.

Structure

Each chapter of the vulkan tutorial is in branches:

1. 00-end-of-drawing
2. 01-drawing-a-triangle
3. 02-vertex-buffers
4. 03-uniform-buffers
5. 04-texture-mapping
6. 05-depth-buffering
7. 06-loading-models
8. 07-generating-mipmaps
9. 08-multisampling
10. 09-compute-shader
11. main branch contains an imgui-vulkan-app.cpp file that integrates imgui with the resulting vulkan renderer.

Dependency managment

These are the project dependencies

1. imgui with glfw, opengl and vulkan bindings
2. glfw - windowing
3. glm - linear algebra, good compatibility with GLSL.
4. stb - loading images
5. tinyobjloader - loading obj models
6. Vulkan

You can follow this guide for setting up dependencies:

Setting up Vulkan

You can install Vulkan from: LunarG

Note the install location. Run the vkcube executable in the Bin directory to verify a successful installation.

Copy Vulkan SDK installation path to the CMakeLists.txt file. Note that it might also be automatically installed by vcpkg.

vcpkg.json

vcpkg is used for package and dependency management. A vcpkg.json user manifest file is provided to help install dependencies or you can install them globally.

# run this in any folder that vcpkg.json is in.
# triplet is optional, but useful on windows
path_to_vcpkg install --triplet triplet_name

# e.g
C:/dev/vcpkg/vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows

Global install:

path_to_vcpkg install imgui[glfw-binding,opengl3-binding,vulkan-binding]:triplet_name
path_to_vcpkg install glad:triplet_name
path_to_vcpkg install glfw3:triplet_name
path_to_vcpkg install glm:triplet_name
path_to_vcpkg install tinyobjloader[double]:triplet_name
path_to_vcpkg install stb:triplet_name
path_to_vcpkg integrate install

Shaders compilation

For branches that make use of the shader code, you would need to compile them before use. Scripts for most platform have been provided to help in the compilation of the shaders. Consult the shaders readme for more information. You would need to do this for both shaders and compute-shaders directories.

# for example
cd ./resources/shaders
./compile.bat
cd ../compute-shaders
./compile.bat

# Linux
cd ./resources/shaders
./compile
cd ../compute-shaders
./compile

Building

Do the following steps

1. Install dependencies
2. Compile shaders
3. Generate and/or Building with CMake

CMake is used to generate project files. If you are working with vcpkg for dependency management, you can pass the toolchain file when you call cmake to generate:

cmake -B ./build -S ./ "-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=the_path_to/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake"

# e.g
cmake -B ./build -S ./ "-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:/dev/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake"

This command will run vcpkg install for you if you have a vcpkg.json file.

Building on the command line

After configuration and generation is done, you can run

cd build
cmake build .

This will build the project.

Using Visual Studio

On Windows, if you prefer working in Visual Studio, after generation is done, you can open the generated sln file and build any target you want. Just make sure it is the selected as a Startup project. The working directory and post build commands have been automatically configured.

Useful resources

• vulkan-tutorial.com
• Integrating Dear ImGui in a custom Vulkan renderer - Frguthmann's blog
• Walnut by TheCherno
• thomasherzog response to What things in the Vulkan code should be changed for the ImGui window rendering?
• ImGui GLFW Vulkan example code
• Sascha Willems imgui example
• vkguide-implementing imgui