Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
4 (2)
Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

4 (2)
By: Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

Overview of this book

OpenGL is a popular cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, while Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics API that targets high-performance applications. 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook helps you learn about modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using C++ programming along with OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. The book begins by setting up a development environment and takes you through the steps involved in building a 3D rendering engine with the help of basic, yet self-contained, recipes. Each recipe will enable you to incrementally add features to your codebase and show you how to integrate different 3D rendering techniques and algorithms into one large project. You'll also get to grips with core techniques such as physically based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. As you advance, you'll explore common techniques and solutions that will help you to work with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering. Finally, you'll discover how to apply optimization techniques to build performant and feature-rich graphics applications. By the end of this 3D rendering book, you'll have gained an improved understanding of best practices used in modern graphics APIs and be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Working with cube map textures

A cube map is a texture that contains six individual 2D textures, comprising six sides of a cube. A useful property of cube maps is that they can be sampled using a direction vector. This comes in handy when you're representing light coming into a scene from different directions. For example, we can store the diffuse part of a physically-based lighting equation in an irradiance cube map.

Loading six faces of a cube map into OpenGL is a fairly straightforward operation. However, instead of just six faces, cube maps are often stored as equirectangular projections or as vertical or horizontal crosses. In this recipe, we will learn how to convert this cube map representation into six faces and load them into OpenGL.

Getting ready

There are many websites that offer high-dynamic range environment textures under various licenses. Check out https://hdrihaven.com and https://hdrmaps.com for useful content.

The complete source code for this recipe...