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

Introducing Volumetric Fog Rendering

What exactly is Volumetric Fog Rendering? As the name suggests, it is the combination of Volumetric Rendering and the fog phenomena. We will now give some background on those components and see how they are combined in the final technique.

Let’s begin with Volumetric Rendering.

Volumetric Rendering

This rendering technique describes the visuals associated with what happens to light when it travels through a participating medium. A participating medium is a volume that contains local changes to density or albedo.

The following diagram summarizes what happens to photons in a participating medium:

Figure 10.2 – Light behavior in a participating medium

Figure 10.2 – Light behavior in a participating medium

What we are trying to describe is how light changes when going through a participating medium, namely a fog volume (or clouds or atmospheric scattering).

There are three main phenomena that happen, as follows:

  • Absorption: This happens...