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

Revisiting Shadows with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are going to implement shadows using ray tracing. In Chapter 8, Adding Shadows Using Mesh Shaders, we used traditional shadow mapping techniques to get the visibility from each light and use that information to compute the shadow term for the final image. Using ray tracing for shadows allows us to get more detailed results and to have finer-grained control over the quality of results based on the distance and intensity of each light.

We are going to implement two techniques: the first one is similar to the one used in offline rendering, where we shoot rays to each light to determine visibility. While this approach gives us the best results, it can be quite expensive depending on the number of lights in the scene.

The second technique is based on a recent article from Ray Tracing Gems. We use some heuristics to determine how many rays we need to cast per light, and we combine the results with spatial and temporal filters...