Brandon Stafferton

BlackJawz

What is BlackJawz?

BlackJawz is a 3D, Entity Component System (ECS) game engine made with every skill and techniques I've learnt. This includes:

• Rendering with DirectX 12 - Lighting, Shadow Mapping, Physical Based Rendering (PBR)
• Skinned Mesh & Skeletal Animations
• Physics - 3D Maths, Quaternions, Forces, Torque, Collisions
• Terrain, Procedural Terrain algorithms & Tessellation

What is my aim?

• Learn DirectX 12 Rendering Pipeline
• Learn how an Entity Component System works and implement it
• Further Expand my knowledge in physics such as cloth physics
• Learn Inverse Kinematics for Skeletal Animation

Entity Component System (ECS)

ECS is a flexible object system commonly used in game engines to manage how objects hold and use data. This makes adding new features easier, like physics or rendering, without having to write blocks of code per object. The advantage of an ECS is that it scales well, more modular and efficient when managing a large number of objects within a video game. It's composed of three main parts:

• Entity - A unique ID for each object
• Component - Store Data/variables for each entity
• System - Updates the logic for each component on every entity

Building an ECS in BlackJawz allowed me to go for my current objectives of exploring different areas of a game engine. For example, I made different components such as Transform which holds and gives each entity a position, rotation and scale; Rigidbody to hold and give each entity forces, acceleration, velocity and friction; Animation to hold and read models skeleton infomation and play different animations.

ImGui Library was used for the GUI.

Rendering

Rendering in BlackJawz uses DirectX 12 API for Drawing, Assimp Library for model loading and ImGui for GUI.

Skeletal Animations

Using Assimp to load in models, I read in the bone data and animation keyframes from the models' skeleton