Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
4 (2)
Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

4 (2)
By: Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

Overview of this book

OpenGL is a popular cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, while Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics API that targets high-performance applications. 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook helps you learn about modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using C++ programming along with OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. The book begins by setting up a development environment and takes you through the steps involved in building a 3D rendering engine with the help of basic, yet self-contained, recipes. Each recipe will enable you to incrementally add features to your codebase and show you how to integrate different 3D rendering techniques and algorithms into one large project. You'll also get to grips with core techniques such as physically based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. As you advance, you'll explore common techniques and solutions that will help you to work with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering. Finally, you'll discover how to apply optimization techniques to build performant and feature-rich graphics applications. By the end of this 3D rendering book, you'll have gained an improved understanding of best practices used in modern graphics APIs and be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Implementing HDR rendering and tone mapping

In all our previous examples, the resulting color values in the framebuffer were clamped between 0.0 and 1.0. Furthermore, we used 1 byte per color component, making only 256 shades of brightness possible, which means the ratio between the darkest and the brightest regions in the image cannot be larger than 256:1. This might seem sufficient for many applications, but what happens if we have a really bright region illuminated by the Sun or multiple lights? Everything will be clamped at 1.0, and any additional information in the higher values of brightness, or luminance, will be lost. These HDR brightness values can be remapped back into a Low Dynamic Range (LDR) 0..1 interval using a tone-mapping technique.

Getting ready

The source code for this demo is located in Chapter8/GL03_HDR/src/main.cpp.

How to do it...

To implement HDR rendering, we need to store HDR values in framebuffers. This can be done using our existing GLFramebuffer...