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 Volumetric Fog

After adding variable rate shading in the previous chapter, we will implement another modern technique that will enhance the visuals of the Raptor Engine: Volumetric Fog. Volumetric rendering and fog are very old topics in rendering literature, but until a few years ago, they were considered impossible for real-time usage.

The possibility of making this technique feasible in real-time stems from the observation that fog is a low-frequency effect; thus the rendering can be at a much lower resolution than the screen, increasing the performance in real-time usage.

Also, the introduction of compute shaders, and thus generic GPU programming, paired with clever observations about approximations and optimizations of the volumetric aspect of the technique, paved the way to unlocking real-time Volumetric Fog.

The main idea comes from the seminal paper by Bart Wronski (https://bartwronski.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/bwronski_volumetric_fog_siggraph2014.pdf) at...