Scene Graph for Deferred Rendering Engine
- by Roy T.
As a learning exercise I've written a deferred rendering engine. Now I'd like to add a scene graph to this engine but I'm a bit puzzled how to do this.
On a normal (forward rendering engine) I would just add all items (All implementing IDrawable and IUpdateAble) to my scene graph, than travel the scene-graph breadth first and call Draw() everywhere.
However in a deferred rendering engine I have to separate draw calls. First I have to draw the geometry, then the shadow casters and then the lights (all to different render targets), before I combine them all. So in this case I can't just travel over the scene graph and just call draw. The way I see it I either have to travel over the entire scene graph 3 times, checking what kind of object it is that has to be drawn, or I have to create 3 separate scene graphs that are somehow connected to each other. Both of these seem poor solutions, I'd like to handle scene objects more transparent.
One other solution I've thought of was traveling trough the scene graph as normal and adding items to 3 separate lists, separating geometry, shadow casters and lights, and then iterating these lists to draw the correct stuff, is this better, and is it wise to repopulate 3 lists every frame?
