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 ray-traced reflections

In this section, we are going to leverage the hardware ray tracing capabilities to implement reflections. Before diving into the code, here’s an overview of the algorithm:

  1. We start with the G-buffer data. We check whether the roughness for a given fragment is below a certain threshold. If it is, we move to the next step. Otherwise, we don’t process this fragment any further.
  2. To make this technique viable in real time, we cast only one reflection ray per fragment. We will demonstrate two ways to pick the reflection’s ray direction: one that simulates a mirror-like surface and another that samples the GGX distribution for a given fragment.
  3. If the reflection ray hits some geometry, we need to compute its surface color. We shoot another ray toward a light that has been selected through importance sampling. If the selected light is visible, we compute the color for the surface using our standard lighting model.
  4. ...