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 SSAO in OpenGL

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is an image-based technique to roughly approximate global illumination in real time. Ambient occlusion itself is a very crude approximation of global illumination. It can be thought of as the amount of open "sky" visible from a point on a surface and not occluded by any local adjacent geometry. In its simplest form, we can estimate this amount by sampling several points in the neighborhood of our point of interest and checking their visibility from the central point.

Getting ready

The Chapter8/GL02_SSAO demo application for this recipe implements basic steps for SSAO. Check out two previous recipes in this chapter, Implementing offscreen rendering in OpenGL and Implementing fullscreen quad rendering, before proceeding with this one.

How to do it...

Instead of tracing the depth buffer's height field, we use an even simpler approach where every selected neighborhood point is projected onto the...