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)

Implementing shadow maps in OpenGL

As we learned from the previous chapters, we can render complex scenes with varying sets of materials, including physically based rendering (PBR) materials. While these techniques can produce very nice images, the visual realism of our scenes was severely lacking. Shadow mapping is one of the cornerstones of getting more realistic rendering results. In this recipe, we will give initial guidance on how to approach basic shadow mapping in OpenGL. Considering OpenGL is significantly less verbose compared to Vulkan, this recipe's main focus will be the shadow-mapping algorithm details, while its Vulkan counterpart is focused on the Vulkan application programming interface (API) details to get you started with shadow mapping.

Getting ready

The Chapter8/GL01_ShadowMapping demo application for this recipe implements basic steps for a projective shadow-mapping pipeline. It would be helpful to quickly go through the code before reading this recipe...