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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't recommend it for most modern-day graphics practitioners. You're much better off reading Physically Based Rendering, and a Trip down the Graphics Pipeline (blog post series). After that, I would recommend reading and playing around with the UE4 source code (which is very approachable).

The "tricks" are nice but don't translate super well to how modern pipelines are usually architected.

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Could you post a link, please? Searching for those terms leads to a '96 book and some different blog posts, but I am not sure if the ones you are referring to. Thanks!

I think he was referring to Pharr's book on PBR:

http://www.pbrt.org/

It is an absolute beast of a book, and not for beginners. Nor is it written as such; After Ch. 1 the book acts less like a sequential book, and more like an extensive reference guide for anything you'd need to really understand what goes on in a Ray Tracer.

As for "A trip down the Graphics Pipeline", I found it fairly easily:

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...

For a gentle intro to Ray tracing that is specifically geared for beginners, and lays a simple foundation for physically based rendering, I'll recommend Pete Shirley's mini-book Ray Tracing in One Weekend. http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one-we...

What would you recommend as prerequisites for PBR?

All that's "really" required is patience and some mathematical maturity. It is a complete book for the most part, but if you already are familiar with concepts like sampling theory, calculus, and concepts like convolutions and signal processing you'll be better off.

Not to be pedantic but "ray tracer" evokes a concept that is a fair bit narrower than a "path tracer." The latter has concepts of sampling multiple directions and attempts to do things like conserve energy, respect the statistical properties of the surfaces it interacts with etc. A perfect ray tracer is easy to write but untenable for most real-world usage so PBRT is written more to the tune of all the various things you can do to improve performance without introducing statistical bias.

Physically Based Rendering[0] Graphics Pipeline[1]

I'd also add Real Time Rendering [2] to that list.

[0] http://www.pbrt.org/ [1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-... [2] http://www.realtimerendering.com/book.html

Yup RTR is a great addition. It's so foundational it keeps slipping my mind to recommend.

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