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

A brief history of shadow techniques

Shadows are one of the biggest additions to any rendering framework as they really enhance the perception of depth and volume across a scene. Being a phenomenon linked to lights, they have been studied in graphics literature for decades, but the problem is still far from being solved.

The most used shadow technique right now is shadow mapping, but recently, thanks to hardware-enabled ray tracing, ray traced shadows are becoming popular as a more realistic solution.

There were some games—especially Doom 3—that also used shadow volumes as a solution to make lights cast shadows, but they are not used anymore.

Shadow volumes

Shadow volumes are an old concept, already proposed by Frank Crow in 1977. They are defined as the projection of each vertex of a triangle along the light direction and toward infinity, thus creating a volume.

The shadows are sharp, and they require each triangle and each light to process accordingly...