Project 6: Liam Dugan -- 82 Late Days

[liamdugan]

Repo Link: https://github.com/liamdugan/Project6-Vulkan-Grass-Rendering

Completed Features:

• Compute shader forces include gravity, wind, and recovery
• Orientation Culling, View-Frustum Culling, Distance Culling
• Vertex, tesselation control, tesselation evaluation, and fragment shaders
• Bezier curve evaluation to determine location of grass blade vertices
• Extra-Credit Variable Level-Of-Detail based on blade distance away

Comments:
This was the single most difficult assignment I've ever had to do at Penn (100+ hours). There was practically zero guidance on how to set up the host code or how to bind descriptor sets from either the slides, the writeup, or the linked tutorials. The easy items are very well explained, the more difficult ones, not enough. The official vulkan tutorial is very good, but it's impossible to learn everything you need to know for this project on there. To make matters worse, the code for implementing this paper is linked within the paper (not to mention the other public students' repos on github are also public) so this complete lack of guidance for this project is very likely driving students to be academically dishonest. I very much enjoyed this assignment once I finished, but please, in the future make the writeup have: a section on explaining what descriptor sets are, a section on tessellation (with an actually working HelloTessellation sample), a section on the differences between GLSL and SPIR-V, a section on which atomics are usable in vulkan, and finally a section on how to allocate uniform buffers and how they are different from vertex buffers.