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

A brief history of shadow techniques

Shadows are one of the biggest additions to any rendering framework as they really enhance the perception of depth and volume across a scene. Being a phenomenon linked to lights, they have been studied in graphics literature for decades, but the problem is still far from being solved.

The most used shadow technique right now is shadow mapping, but recently, thanks to hardware-enabled ray tracing, ray traced shadows are becoming popular as a more realistic solution.

There were some games—especially Doom 3—that also used shadow volumes as a solution to make lights cast shadows, but they are not used anymore.

Shadow volumes

Shadow volumes are an old concept, already proposed by Frank Crow in 1977. They are defined as the projection of each vertex of a triangle along the light direction and toward infinity, thus creating a volume.

The shadows are sharp, and they require each triangle and each light to process accordingly...