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

Implementing shadow mapping using mesh shaders

Now that we have looked at the different ways to render a shadow, we will describe the algorithm and the implementation’s detail used to render many shadow maps at once leveraging the mesh shader power.

Overview

In this section, we will give an overview of the algorithm. What we are trying to achieve is to render shadows using meshlets and mesh shaders, but this will require some compute work to generate commands to actually draw the meshlets.

We will draw shadows coming from point lights, and we will use cubemaps as textures to store the necessary information. We will talk about cubemaps in the following section.

Back to the algorithm, the first step will be to cull mesh instances against lights. This is done in a compute shader and will save a per-light list of visible mesh instances. Mesh instances are used to retrieve associated meshes later on, and per-meshlet culling will be performed using task shaders later on...