Scenic is a Garnet service that composes graphical objects from multiple processes into a shared scene graph. These objects are rendered within a unified lighting environment (to a display or other render target); this means that the objects can cast shadows or reflect light onto each other, even if the originating processes have no knowledge of each other.
Scenic's responsibilities are:
Composition: Scenic provides a retained-mode 3D scene graph that contains content that is independently generated and linked together by its clients. Composition makes it possible to seamlessly intermix the graphical content of separately implemented UI components.
Animation: Scenic re-evaluates any time-varying expressions within models prior to rendering each frame, thereby enabling animation of model properties without further intervention from clients. Offloading animations to Scenic ensures smooth jank-free transitions.
Rendering: Scenic renders its scene graph using Escher, a rendering library built on Vulkan, which applies realistic lighting and shadows to the entire scene.
Scheduling: Scenic schedules scene updates and animations to anticipate and match the rendering target's presentation latency and refresh interval.
Diagnostics: Scenic provides a diagnostic interface to help developers debug their models and measure performance.
The SceneManager FIDL interface is Scenic's front door. Each instance of the interface represents a Scenic instance (we plan to rename the interface to Scenic soon). Each Scenic instance is an isolated rendering context with its own content, render targets, and scheduling loop.
The following operations are provided:
Sessions to publish graphical content to this instance.A single Scenic instance can update, animate, and render multiple Scenes (trees of graphical objects) to multiple targets in tandem on the same scheduling loop. This means that the timing model for a Scenic instance is coherent: all of its associated content belongs to the same scheduling domain and can be seamlessly intermixed.
Conversely, independent Scenic instances cannot share content and are therefore not coherent amongst themselves. Creating separate Scenic instances can be useful for rendering to targets which have very different scheduling requirements or for running tests in isolation.
When a Scenic instance is destroyed, all of its sessions become inoperable and its rendering ceases.
Views typically do not deal with the Scenic instance directly; instead they receive a Scenic Session from the view manager.
The Session FIDL interface is the primary API used by clients of Scenic to contribute graphical content in the form of Resources. Each session has its own resource table and is unable to directly interact with resources belonging to other sessions.
Each session provides the following operations:
When a session is destroyed, all of its resources are released and all of its links become inoperable.
Views typically receive separate sessions from the view manager.
Resources represent scene elements such as nodes, shapes, materials, and animations which belong to particular Sessions.
The list of Scenic resources is described by the API: //garnet/public/fidl/fuchsia.ui.gfx/resources.fidl
Clients of Scenic generate graphical content to be rendered by queuing and submitting operations to add, remove, or modify resources within their session.
Each resource is identified within its session by a locally unique id which is assigned by the owner of the session (by arbitrary means). Sessions cannot directly refer to resources which belong to other sessions (even if they happen to know their id) therefore content embedding between sessions is performed using Link objects as intermediaries.
To add a resource, perform the following steps:
Certain more complex resources may reference the ids of other resources within their own definition. For instance, a Node references its Shape thus the Shape must be added before the Node so that the node may reference it as part of its definition.
To modify a resource, enqueue one or more operations to set the desired properties in the same manner used when the resource was added.
The remove a resource, enqueue an operation to remove the resource.
Removing a resource causes its id to become available for reuse. However, the session maintains a reference count for each resource which is internally referenced. The underlying storage will not be released (and cannot be reused) until all remaining references to the resource have been cleared and until the next frame which does not require the resource has been presented. This is especially important for Memory resources. See also Fences.
This process of addition, modification, and removal may be repeated indefinitely to incrementally update resources within a session.
A Node resource represents a graphical object which can be assembled into a hierarchy called a node tree for rendering.
TODO: Discuss this in more detail, especially hierarchical modeling concepts such as per-node transforms, groups, adding and removing children, etc.
A Scene resource combines a tree of nodes with the scene-wide parameters needed to render it. A Scenic instance may contain multiple scenes but each scene must have its own independent tree of nodes.
A scene resource has the following properties:
In order to render a scene, a Camera must be pointed at it.
Compositors are resources that come in two flavors: DisplayCompositor and ImagePipeCompositor; their job is to draw the content of a LayerStack into their render target. For DisplayCompositor, the target display may have multiple hardware overlays; in this case the compositor may choose associate each of these with a separate layer, rather than flattening the layers into a single image.
A LayerStack resource consists of an ordered list of Layers. Each layer can contain either an Image (perhaps transformed by a matrix), or a Camera that points at a Scene to be rendered (as described above).
Add sections to discuss all other kinds of resources: shapes, materials, links, memory, images, buffers, animations, variables, renderers etc.
TODO: Talk about scheduling frames, presentation timestamps, etc.
TODO: Talk about synchronization.
Talk about how to get started using Scenic, running examples, recommended implementation strategies, etc.