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

How screen-space reflections work

Reflections are an important rendering element that can provide a better sense of immersion in the scene. For this reason, developers have developed a few techniques over the years to include this effect, even before ray tracing hardware was available.

One of the most common approaches is to ray-march the scene after the G-buffer data becomes available. Whether a surface will produce reflections is determined by the material’s roughness. Only materials with a low roughness will emit a reflection. This also helps reduce the cost of this technique since usually, only a low number of surfaces will satisfy this requirement.

Ray marching is a technique similar to ray tracing and was introduced in Chapter 10, Adding Volumetric Fog. As a quick reminder, ray marching works similarly to ray tracing. Instead of traversing the scene to determine whether the ray hit any geometry, we move in the ray’s direction by small increments for a fixed...