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 Volumetric Fog Rendering

We now have all the knowledge necessary to read the code needed to get this algorithm fully working. From a CPU perspective, it is just a series of compute shaders dispatches, so it is straightforward.

The core of this technique is implemented throughout various shaders, and thus on the GPU, working for almost all steps on the frustum aligned Volumetric Texture we talked about in the previous section.

Figure 10.7 shows the different algorithm steps, and we will see each one individually in the following sections.

Data injection

In the first shader, we will write scattering and extinction, starting from the color and density of different fog phenomena.

We decided to add three different fog effects, as follows:

  • A constant fog
  • Height fog
  • Fog in a volume

For each fog, we need to calculate scattering and extinction and accumulate them.

The following code converts color and density to scattering and extinction...