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

Adding Shadows Using Mesh Shaders

In the previous chapter, we added support for multiple lights using clustered deferred techniques with the latest innovations.

We added a hard limit of 256 maximum lights, with the possibility for each one to be dynamic and unique in its properties.

In this chapter, we will add the possibility for each of these lights to cast shadows to further enhance the visuals of any asset displayed in Raptor Engine, and we will exploit the possibilities given by mesh shaders of having many of these lights cast shadows and still be in a reasonable frame time.

We will also have a look at using sparse resources to improve shadow map memory usage, moving the possibility of having many shadow-casting lights from something almost impossible to something possible and performant with current hardware.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • A brief history of shadow techniques
  • Implementing shadow mapping using mesh...