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Comment by solidangle | Hacker News Reader

I can also recommend the more in-depth, Academy Award winning, book "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation" [1] by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys (and Wenzel Jakob for the soon-to-be-released third edition). The book has nearly 1200 pages though so, unlike Shirley's book, you probably won't be able to read it in a single weekend. It covers both the theory and the implementation of rendering techniques which are close to the state of the art and it provides many pointers to interesting papers.

[1] http://pbrt.org/

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I have a question about this book. How are you supposed to follow along with it? Peter Shirley's book encourages the reader to program the renderer along with the explanations. It doesn't seem like that is possible with PBRT, but I might be misunderstanding something.

pbrt is a raytracer code + a book to explain the code and the maths involved. You don't really need the code to read and understand the book. It's an amazing idea and his award is truly deserved. The point is not to learn you how to _write_ a raytracer but to explain how a production raytracer _works_.

There are exercises at the end of each chapter. Most exercises ask you to implement something new in pbrt, often something described in a (SIGGRAPH) paper. Pbrt is very modular and it's quite easy to add a new acceleration structure, a new shape, a new light, etc. I haven't done these exercises myself though, I mostly use the book as a reference while implementing my own renderer.

PBRT is big because it is written using literate programming and therefore includes (almost[1]) the entire source code for the ray tracer in print, which arguably makes it easier to follow than other books on the topic.

The PBRT ray tracer is also a production quality ray tracer and uses many advanced techniques you won't find hobby ray tracers, such as differential geometry, which naturally increases it's size.

[1] Some utility classes are left out.

For those who are poor, and still wish to read this, go to here:

REDACTED as per author's request

Hi, Kefka.

I'm the author of the book.

Could you please not post links to pirated versions of it on HN?

Thanks, Matt

My apologies. I'm used to having rip-offs like Elsiver and such in academia that I assumed that you (the author) were also in the same predicament.

When the search on the common academic piracy pages showed this book, I assumed that I was only harming the parasitic journal companies. Evidently, I wasnt :/ For that, I apologise.

No worries!

The publishing industry has gotten worse in a lot of ways in the ~10 years since we did the first edition. The whole for-profit academic journals thing makes me sad in general, etc.

However, it's also impressive how much work how many people put in to publish a book (illustrators, proof-readers, copy editors, professional layout, etc., etc.). For a specialist book like PBR that sells ~1500 copies a year, no one involved is making a ton of money from the process including, as far as I can figure, the publisher.

Even though the most important reason I've done my part of that work is to try to spread knowledge as widely as possible, that all does make me want to do my small part to discourage piracy. :-)

I keep meaning to read this, but the price tag (~$100) keeps putting me off for something I'd just read mostly for enjoyment. One of these months I'll bite the bullet and order it.

The book is expensive, but it's worth every dollar in my opinion. I'd recommend waiting a few months though, the third edition will be released before the end of year.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll keep an eye out.

The investment of effort and time you would need to put into the study of a serious book, whether for enjoyment or self-education, especially of an over 1000-page book like this one, seems to me incomparably bigger than a few dozen dollars you would have to pay for it. If, on the other hand, all you want is to have it on your bookshelf - just in case, then, of course, the book may end up being merely an expensive souvenir.

Eh, it's a leisure activity for me: I read Principles and Practice for fun. It's a question of whether I want to spend a good chunk of this month's leisure budget on this book. It's out of impulse-purchase range, so I keep putting it off. One of these days... :)

It is well worth the money. I still have my first edition copy on my desk, the second edition on my nightstand and the money ready for the third edition. It easily replaces several other, pricey books.

If you are an ACM member, it is also available to you as eBook: http://learning.acm.org/books/book_detail.cfm?id=1854996&typ...

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