Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Pawel Lapinski
Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By: Pawel Lapinski

Overview of this book

Vulkan is the next generation graphics API released by the Khronos group. It is expected to be the successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, which it shares some similarities with such as its cross-platform capabilities, programmed pipeline stages, or nomenclature. Vulkan is a low-level API that gives developers much more control over the hardware, but also adds new responsibilities such as explicit memory and resources management. With it, though, Vulkan is expected to be much faster. This book is your guide to understanding Vulkan through a series of recipes. We start off by teaching you how to create instances in Vulkan and choose the device on which operations will be performed. You will then explore more complex topics such as command buffers, resources and memory management, pipelines, GLSL shaders, render passes, and more. Gradually, the book moves on to teach you advanced rendering techniques, how to draw 3D scenes, and how to improve the performance of your applications. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the latest advanced techniques implemented with the Vulkan API, which can be used on a wide range of platforms.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Adding shadows to the scene

Lighting is one of the most important operations performed by 3D applications. Unfortunately, due to the specifics of graphics libraries and the graphics hardware itself, lighting calculations have one major drawback--they don't have information about positions of all drawn objects. That's why generating shadows requires a special approach and advanced rendering algorithms.

There are several popular techniques targeted at efficient generation of natural looking shadows. Now we will learn about a technique called shadow mapping.

An example of an image generated with this recipe looks like:

Getting ready

The shadow mapping technique requires us to render a scene twice. Firstly, we render objects that cast shadows. They are rendered...