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

Further reading

The book Real-Time Shadows provides a good overview of many techniques to implement shadows, many of which are still in use today.

GPU Pro 360 Guide to Shadows collects articles from the GPU Pro series that are focused on shadows.

An interesting technique described in the book is called tetrahedron shadow mapping: the idea is to project the shadow map to a tetrahedron and then unwrap it to a single texture.

The original concept was introduced in the Shadow Mapping for Omnidirectional Light Using Tetrahedron Mapping chapter (originally published in GPU Pro) and later expanded in Tile-based Omnidirectional Shadows (originally published in GPU Pro 6).

For more details, we refer you to the code provided by the author: http://www.hd-prg.com/tileBasedShadows.html.

Our sparse texture implementation is based on this SIGGRAPH presentation: https://efficientshading.com/wp-content/uploads/s2015_shadows.pdf.

This expands on their original paper, found here: http...