Realistic Ray Tracing

What Hacker News says

1. yannicktFeb 2017
   I've read Realistic Ray Tracing by Shirley, before reading the first edition of PBRT. RRT definitely has a more "incremental" approach, and is a lot more approachable than PBRT.
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2. KeyframeMay 2016
   I didn't know Peter Shirley wrote more books! "Realistic Ray Tracing" was definitely a good introductory book back in the day.
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3. tomvbusselAug 2015
   Yeah it was a great learning tool. pbrt is a good learning tool, but sadly it already implements most of the basics. Courses at Cornell and ETH Zürich used a small rendering framework called Nori [1], which is a pretty good learning tool. Shadertoy is nice, but perhaps a bit annoying to work in (as it involves a lot of tricks). I guess the best way to learn is to write your own ray tracer, but that takes a lot of time.

   The current edition of Physically Based Rendering still uses literate programming, but most of the maths are separated from the code, so you can skip over most of the code. Even if you can't stand I can really recommend reading it, as it's a great book. Shirley's Realistic Ray Tracing is still very useful these days, but obviously it's lacking the state of the art. If you really want to avoid any code you should read Veach's PhD thesis [2] and then some papers on BSDFs [3], shapes [4] and ray tracing acceleration [5].

   [1] http://wjakob.github.io/nori/

   [2] http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/

   [3] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/publications/EGSR07-btdf.html

   [4] http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/pubs/1997/MT97.html

   [5] http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_research_pub_012.html

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4. dahartFeb 2017
   I like the walls made of spheres! The real Cornell box is about 2 feet cubed IIRC... that would make the units of this scene file something close to centimeters... which would mean the walls are spheres with a diameter of about 1.2 miles.

   Last time I saw the box in person, I made sure to leave some fingerprints. :P

   > Realistic Ray Tracing, by Peter Shirley > Almost 100% of smallpt is derived from this book.

   FWIW, Peter Shirley distilled all the fun parts of Realistic Ray Tracing into an easy quick e-book available for $3, or free with the trial. "Ray Tracing in One Weekend."

   https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B5AODD8/

   Blog post about it w/ more code & lots of resources: http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one-we...

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5. generic_userJan 2016
   This looks like a slimmed down version of the book Realistic Ray Tracing writen by the same author Peter Shirley. The book is still very short ~200 pages and develops a raytracer.

   http://www.amazon.com/Realistic-Tracing-Second-Peter-Shirley...

   He has also written one of my favorite general introductions to computer graphics if your looking for a usable survey text that has most of the basic formulas.

   http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Fourth-...

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