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

Introduction to indirect lighting

Going back to direct and indirect lighting, direct lighting just shows the first interaction between light and matter, but light continues to travel in space, bouncing at times.

From a rendering perspective, we use the G-buffer information to calculate the first light interaction with surfaces that are visible from our point of view, but we have little data on what is outside of our view.

The following diagram shows direct lighting:

Figure 14.2 – Direct lighting

Figure 14.2 – Direct lighting

Figure 14.2 describes the current lighting setup. There are light-emitting rays, and those rays interact with surfaces. Light bounces off these surfaces and is captured by the camera, becoming the pixel color. This is an extremely simplified vision of the phenomena, but it contains all the basics we need.

For indirect lighting, relying only on the camera’s point of view is insufficient as we need to calculate how other lights and geometries...