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)

Drawing particles using compute and graphics pipelines

Due to the nature of graphics hardware and the way objects are processed by the graphics pipeline, it is quite hard to display phenomena such as clouds, smoke, sparks, fire, falling rain, and snow. Such effects are usually simulated with particle systems, which are a large number of small sprites that behave according to the algorithms implemented for the system.

Because of the very large number of independent entities, it is convenient to implement the behavior and mutual interactions of particles using compute shaders. Sprites mimicking the look of each particle are usually displayed as billboards with geometry shaders.

In the following example, we can see an image generated with this recipe:

How to do it...

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