Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

14

Adding Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray Tracing

So far in this book, illumination has been based on direct lighting coming from point lights. In this chapter, we will enhance lighting by adding indirect lighting, often referred to as global illumination in the context of video games.

This type of illumination comes from emulating the behavior of light. Without going into quantum physics and optics, the information we need to consider is that light bounces off surfaces a few times until its energy becomes zero.

Throughout movies and video games, global illumination has always been an important aspect of lighting, but often impossible to perform in real time.

With movies, it often took minutes (if not hours) to render a single frame, ...