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

Implementing shadow mapping using mesh shaders

Now that we have looked at the different ways to render a shadow, we will describe the algorithm and the implementation’s detail used to render many shadow maps at once leveraging the mesh shader power.

Overview

In this section, we will give an overview of the algorithm. What we are trying to achieve is to render shadows using meshlets and mesh shaders, but this will require some compute work to generate commands to actually draw the meshlets.

We will draw shadows coming from point lights, and we will use cubemaps as textures to store the necessary information. We will talk about cubemaps in the following section.

Back to the algorithm, the first step will be to cull mesh instances against lights. This is done in a compute shader and will save a per-light list of visible mesh instances. Mesh instances are used to retrieve associated meshes later on, and per-meshlet culling will be performed using task shaders later on...