Renderables

Renderables are the objects in a scene that a graphics or game engine can draw through its rendering pipeline. In general, a renderable encapsulates the data and state required to produce an image, including geometry, materials, textures, and transformation information.

A renderable typically consists of a mesh (vertices and indices), a material or shader program, and a transform that places it in world space. Additional properties such as visibility, culling mode, lighting, and level of detail influence how and whether it is drawn.

Renderables come in many forms: static meshes, dynamic or animated meshes, 2D sprites and UI elements, and particle systems. They can be part of a scene graph or a render queue. Some engines distinguish renderables by rendering path (forward rendering, deferred rendering) or by layer (opaque, transparent).

Rendering process: renderables are collected into batches for efficiency, undergo frustum culling and occlusion, then submit draw calls to the GPU via command buffers. Sorting often handles transparency, while opaque objects are batched by material to minimize state changes.

Relation to tools: In many engines, a renderable is an abstract concept; concrete components or entities expose meshes, materials, and transforms that renderers consume. Managing renderables effectively is central to performance and visual fidelity.