Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (2)
By: Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone

Overview of this book

Vulkan is now an established and flexible multi-platform graphics API. It has been adopted in many industries, including game development, medical imaging, movie productions, and media playback but learning it can be a daunting challenge due to its low-level, complex nature. Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan is designed to help you overcome this difficulty, providing a practical approach to learning one of the most advanced graphics APIs. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll focus on building a high-performance rendering engine from the ground up. You’ll explore Vulkan’s advanced features, such as pipeline layouts, resource barriers, and GPU-driven rendering, to automate tedious tasks and create efficient workflows. Additionally, you'll delve into cutting-edge techniques like mesh shaders and real-time ray tracing, elevating your graphics programming to the next level. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of modern rendering engines to confidently handle large-scale projects. Whether you're developing games, simulations, or visual effects, this guide will equip you with the skills and knowledge to harness Vulkan’s full potential.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations of a Modern Rendering Engine
7
Part 2: GPU-Driven Rendering
13
Part 3: Advanced Rendering Techniques

Adding Shadows Using Mesh Shaders

In the previous chapter, we added support for multiple lights using clustered deferred techniques with the latest innovations.

We added a hard limit of 256 maximum lights, with the possibility for each one to be dynamic and unique in its properties.

In this chapter, we will add the possibility for each of these lights to cast shadows to further enhance the visuals of any asset displayed in Raptor Engine, and we will exploit the possibilities given by mesh shaders of having many of these lights cast shadows and still be in a reasonable frame time.

We will also have a look at using sparse resources to improve shadow map memory usage, moving the possibility of having many shadow-casting lights from something almost impossible to something possible and performant with current hardware.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • A brief history of shadow techniques
  • Implementing shadow mapping using mesh...