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)

Rendering a geometry with a fragment specular lighting

Specular lighting allows us to add bright highlights or reflections on the surface of a model. This way rendered geometry looks shinier and more glossy.

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

Getting ready

The most commonly used algorithm describing the way surfaces are lit is a Blinn-Phong model. It is an empirical model, which isn't physically correct but gives results that are more plausible in situations where rendered geometry is simplified. So it is well suited for 3D real-time graphics.

The Blinn-Phong model describes light leaving a given surface as a sum of four components:

  • Emissive: The amount of light emitted by the surface
  • : The amount of reflected light...