Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (1)
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. Learning Vulkan is a foundational step to understanding how a modern graphics API works, both on desktop and mobile. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll begin by developing the foundations of a rendering framework. You’ll learn how to leverage advanced Vulkan features to write a modern rendering engine. The chapters will cover how to automate resource binding and dependencies. You’ll then take advantage of GPU-driven rendering to scale the size of your scenes and finally, you’ll get familiar with ray tracing techniques that will improve the visual quality of your rendered image. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of a modern rendering engine and the graphics techniques employed to achieve state-of-the-art results. The framework developed in this book will be the starting point for all your future experiments.
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...