An Introduction to Ray Tracing (1989) | Hacker News Reader

An Introduction to Ray Tracing (1989)

realtimerendering.com

194 pointswalterbell19 comments

"I've decided to make pdf's of my ray tracing books available at "pay what you want". This can include zero, which I encourage for students and any other cash-strapped people. 50% of gross proceeds will go to programming education non-for-profits."

Peter Shirley

https://twitter.com/Peter_shirley/status/984947257035243520

Something similar also popped up on the /r/programming subreddit today that I found very easy to follow through

Understandable RayTracing in 256 lines of bare C++ https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraytracer/wiki

https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraytracer/blob/master/tinyraytr...

Wow, this is a terrific repo, props to the creator! I'm gonna try and recreate this in Golang as a learning exercise.

I think you could also submit it as a standalone post for more visibility. ;)

This came up yesterday, you’ll see if it you go back a page or two, or use the search.

Holy crap, I bought this book when it came out and lost it in a move long ago. I guess if I live long enough all my favorite computer texts will be available free at some point.

Well that's funny.

Back around 1992 or so I picked up a copy of this book, in hardcover, from a local bookstore (Bookstar - remember them?) - still in plastic wrap.

I was like 19 and naive. I paid something like $80.00 for it.

Opened it up - tried to understand it - the math was well beyond my pay grade.

Still is.

It's been sitting on my shelf every since. Probably the worst book purchase I ever made; had it not been in plastic I could have at least leafed thru it to see that I wouldn't understand it. At the time, $80.00 was a lot for me.

Live and learn, I guess!

In a nutshell, simplest form of raytracing: imagine a point where your eye sits behind the screen, throw lines from this point into the screen hitting each pixel dead center into the scene, check which objects you hit, how far away from the origin point that happens and sort by depth. Take the nearest one, render in color based on angle of incidence compared to lightsource.

That's the very simplest form of raytracing that you could do, then you can add reflection and transparency and other niceties that lead to the splitting of the rays and a summation at each hit.

This is actually reverse raytracing, forward raytracing starts from the lightsource, doing it backwards is an optimization because a lot of the light would end up hitting absorbing surfaces long before it would hit the plane of projection.

First year college I bought a 500$ textbook on mathematics. Tried to read it for 10 years. Didn't learn a thing. Reddit thread on abstract algebra mentionned a title that was cheap on amazon (used). 5$ shipped from the US, unlocked everything I ever was struggling with on the subject. Weird right :)

A few additional ray tracing resources:

https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/ray_...

Might I suggest http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratc... (shameless plug)?

And on the other end of the scale, http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/tiny-raytracer.html (another shameless plug)?

http://www.pbr-book.org

I quite enjoyed Ray Tracing from the Ground Up when I was learning ray tracing for the first time.

http://www.raytracegroundup.com/

The linked pdf copy has kinda mediocre quality. Google’s scanned copy looks a lot better. I wonder if it would be possible to get google’s pdf to share instead since there is legal permission?

Oh, awesome! This is the book I learned ray tracing from. The basic math is still very relevant.

Quite old. Latest 2014. Still relevant?

As the post says "math doesn't rot". There's lots of innovation on the more advanced end, but if you want to understand the basics, not that much has changed.

The fundamentals of Ray Tracing are very simple and haven't changed. Most of the advances in Ray Tracing are either simulating complicated materials (e.g. skin, or perfect simulations of car paint) or speed optimizations advancing the quest for real time Ray Tracing.

I think you'll find old books like these quite the treasure. The fundamental concepts don't change, and there's a lot of old books out there you can have on your doorstep for less than $10.

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