Vulkan Schnee targets desktop VR scenes authored in Blender. The engine imports glTF scene data, uploads it into GPU-side render buffers, and renders through a Vulkan/OpenXR pipeline.

What The Engine Is Built For

Desktop VR through OpenXR.
Static or mostly-static worlds with baked lighting and authored scene data.
GPU-driven rendering of glTF scenes.
Blender as the primary editor and export path.
Gameplay prototypes using actors, components, physics, audio, and VR input.

Core Systems

Area	Capability
Rendering	Vulkan renderer, OpenXR stereo rendering, desktop mirror output
Scene Data	glTF import, scene spawning, actor and component model
GPU Scene	Shared buffers for geometry, materials, transforms, meshlets, and draw data
Culling	Frustum culling, LOD cluster selection, meshlet binning, indirect draw generation
Lighting	Static lightmaps, SH probes, directional shadows, IBL resources, tonemapping
Gameplay	Physics, raycasts, audio, skeletal animation, input, runtime scene loading
Tooling	Blender plugins, custom glTF metadata, lightmap baking, SH probe baking

Rendering Pipeline

The renderer keeps scene data in GPU buffers and uses compute stages to reduce visible work before drawing. The primary path uses meshlets, material binning, and indirect commands.

See Renderer Overview and GPU-Driven Rendering Pipeline for the detailed render flow.

Content Pipeline

Blender is the authoring environment. The editor plugin adds engine-specific material and object properties, and the exporter writes those properties into glTF extensions.

The engine import path reads mesh data, materials, collision metadata, lightmap metadata, and SH probe data from exported assets.

See Blender Exporter Plugin, Lightmap Baking, and SH Probe Baking for pipeline details.

Runtime Systems

Runtime code uses actors, components, scene loading, physics, audio, skeletal animation, and input systems. The Air Hockey project contains gameplay examples and VR movement experiments built on top of those systems.

See Asset Loading System, Custom Actor And Component Handbook, Physics Queries, and Input Handling for implementation details.

Current Constraints

The main target is desktop VR, not mobile VR.
Mesh shaders are optional at runtime. The renderer enables vertex-shader-only mode when mesh shaders are unavailable.
Blender is the expected content authoring workflow.
Some gameplay systems are prototype-level and game-specific.