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 Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray Tracing

So far in this book, illumination has been based on direct lighting coming from point lights. In this chapter, we will enhance lighting by adding indirect lighting, often referred to as global illumination in the context of video games.

This type of illumination comes from emulating the behavior of light. Without going into quantum physics and optics, the information we need to consider is that light bounces off surfaces a few times until its energy becomes zero.

Throughout movies and video games, global illumination has always been an important aspect of lighting, but often impossible to perform in real time.

With movies, it often took minutes (if not hours) to render a single frame, until global illumination was pioneered. Video games were inspired by this and now include it in their lighting.

In this chapter, we will discover how to implement real-time global illumination by covering these topics:

  • Introduction...