Recommend book or tutorial? (Raytracing)
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I have been reading a lot about ray tracing and how it’s performed. It seems simple enough, I was wondering if anyone could recommended a good introductory book on ray tracing or if there was some good tutorials on ray tracing I could read in the mean time.
Photorealism and Raytracing in C (warning, it's pretty old, although the theory is still quite sound; probably hard to find)
Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation
Realtime Rendering, 2nd. ed.
Advanced Global Illumination
Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping
Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation
Realtime Rendering, 2nd. ed.
Advanced Global Illumination
Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping
The best intro I can think of is Shirley's Realistic Ray-Tracing (2nd Ed.)
Simple to read and goes from the very basics to Monte Carlo Integration. 100% recommended, though topic's covered are not as broad as in "Physically Based rendering" book. If you can afford it you should get both.
For more advanced topics Jensen's book on photon mapping is the way to go.
If you're going to implement a GI ray-tracer you may want to google for "global illumination compendium" and "Vlastimil Havran thesis".
Simple to read and goes from the very basics to Monte Carlo Integration. 100% recommended, though topic's covered are not as broad as in "Physically Based rendering" book. If you can afford it you should get both.
For more advanced topics Jensen's book on photon mapping is the way to go.
If you're going to implement a GI ray-tracer you may want to google for "global illumination compendium" and "Vlastimil Havran thesis".
Quote:Original post by drjekyll
The best intro I can think of is Shirley's Realistic Ray-Tracing (2nd Ed.)
Simple to read and goes from the very basics to Monte Carlo Integration. 100% recommended, though topic's covered are not as broad as in "Physically Based rendering" book. If you can afford it you should get both.
I would only get "Physically Based Rendering" (I already have it ;-) ). It teaches a lot of stuff from the ground up and explains everything very good. I have not used it for writing a raytracer, but to write and understand the PRT stuff more clearly.
"Physically Based Rendering" is wonderful, but I wouldn,'t say that it suits the needs of a beginner. Start with the tutorials on Devmaster. Definitely buy this book if you want to be serious with RT and global illumination...
I´d also recommend "Physically based rendering". I have just restructured my formerly crappy raytracer according to this book (my RT is still far from good, but much better than before ;) ). Nice read and good explanations most of the time, except for some references to code-snippets that were shown 200 or 300 pages earlier that can get a little confusing, but I guess that´s hard to avoid.
Nevertheless it helped me a lot. Haven´t read Shirley´s book though.
Nevertheless it helped me a lot. Haven´t read Shirley´s book though.
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