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)

Specifying a pipeline blend state

Transparent objects are very common in the environment we see every day around us. Such objects are also common in 3D applications. To simulate transparent materials and simplify operations that the hardware needs to perform to render transparent objects, blending was introduced. It mixes the color of a processed fragment with a color that is already stored in a framebuffer. Parameters for this operation are prepared through a graphics pipeline's blend state.

How to do it...

  1. Create a variable of type VkPipelineColorBlendAttachmentState named attachment_blend_states.
  2. For each color attachment used in a subpass in which a given graphics pipeline is bound, add a new element to the attachment_blend_states vector. If the independentBlend...