Further Readings

Ray Tracing in One Weekend

• Turner Whitted's seminal 1980 ray tracing paper

• Chapter 1: Overview

  • Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, 4th Ed, Marschner and Shirley
  • The Graphics Codex, Mcguire
  • Real-Time Rendering, 4th Ed, Akenine-Möller et al.
  • Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice_, 3rd Ed, Hughes et al.

• Chapter 2: Output an image

  • stb_image
  • High Dynamic Range Imaging: Acquisition, Display, and Image-Based Lighting_, 2nd Ed, Reingard et al.

• Chapter 3: The vec3 class

  • Create separate classes for points, displacements, colors, etc. Example
  • Using the compiler to do dimensional analysis: velocity, length, time are different types
    • Found to be too cubersome in the 1990s
    • Researchers at Dartmouth making a serious effort

• Chapter 4: Rays, a simple camera, and background

  • Add an environment map to your background function
  • A terrific history of environment mapping
  • The easiest mapping is to use a single image for the entire sphere of directions
  • Example probes for use

• Chapter 5: Adding a sphere

  • Adding triangles using Barycentric methods
  • Ellipses
  • Instancing
  • Composite objects using CSG methods

• Chapter 6: Surface Normals and multiple objects

  • Use a BVH

• Chapter 8: Antialiasing

  • Implementation in the book is called "Box filtering" ("Good enough" for most situations)
  • Use a Gaussian-like filter instead
  • Can either:
    • Uniformly sample the screen and weight the samples
    • Non-uniformly sample

• Chapter 9: Diffuse Materials

  • "Ideal" diffuse is also called "Lambertian" and are used 99% of the time in graphics
  • Real diffuse objects are not exactly Lambertian
    • e.g. become specular at grazing angle

• Chapter 10: Metal

  • Have the color of the metal go to white at grazing angle
    • Schlick Approximation works for this
  • Can use the exact Fresnel equations. But normal incident is usually adequate.

• Chapter 11: Dielectrics

  • Filtering of light within a dielectric
  • Can be modeled by exponential decay, covered well in the Beer's Law section

• Chapter 12: Positionable camera

  • Replace the camera parameter setting in the book with a camera matrix.

• Chapter 11: Defocus Blur

  • Match a real camera
  • Match a real lens

• Chapter 14: Where next?

  • Make it physically accurate
    • Use spectra instead of RGB
    • Confirm your results with a color checker: X-Rite ColorChecker Classic (MSCCC)
  • Generate animations
    • Lots of movies use a ray traced system (most, actually)
    • Disney
    • Pixar
    • Solid Angle
  • Make it fast!

Ray Tracing the Next Week

Ray Tracing The Rest of Your Life