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

Revisiting Shadows with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are going to implement shadows using ray tracing. In Chapter 8, Adding Shadows Using Mesh Shaders, we used traditional shadow mapping techniques to get the visibility from each light and use that information to compute the shadow term for the final image. Using ray tracing for shadows allows us to get more detailed results and to have finer-grained control over the quality of results based on the distance and intensity of each light.

We are going to implement two techniques: the first one is similar to the one used in offline rendering, where we shoot rays to each light to determine visibility. While this approach gives us the best results, it can be quite expensive depending on the number of lights in the scene.

The second technique is based on a recent article from Ray Tracing Gems. We use some heuristics to determine how many rays we need to cast per light, and we combine the results with spatial and temporal filters...