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 normal mapped geometry

Normal mapping is a technique that allows us to increase the details of a model's surface without increasing its geometrical complexity. Using this technique, normal vectors associated with vertices are not used during lighting calculations. They are replaced with normal vectors read from an image (a texture). This way, the shape of a model is unchanged, so we don't need additional processing power to transform vertices. However, the lighting quality is much better and depends only on the quality of a normal map image instead of the complexity of the model.

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

Getting ready

Normal map is an image, in which normal vectors acquired from a highly detailed...