
Ray Tracing in One Weekend - dahart
http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one-weekend.html
======
sxp
If you want to learn more, the best raytracing book is
[http://www.pbrt.org/](http://www.pbrt.org/) which goes into immense details
about various techniques and won an Academy Award. The renderer described in
the book is also available online:
[https://github.com/mmp/pbrt-v3](https://github.com/mmp/pbrt-v3)

~~~
alkonaut
Note that the pbrt-v3 code is the updated code corresponding to the soon-to-
be-released 3rd edition of the book, but the book available in bookstores is
still the 2nd ed. If you like me plan on buying the book soon, you probably
want to wait just a little while for 3rd ed which is due any time now.

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generic_user
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Realistic-Tracing-Second-Peter-
Shirley/dp/1568814615/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453952161&sr=1-4&keywords=Ray+Tracing+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-...](http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Fourth-
Marschner/dp/1482229390/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453952450&sr=1-1)

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corysama
The author wrote a short blog post about the process of speed-writing the
book.

[http://psgraphics.blogspot.com/2016/01/process-for-speed-
wri...](http://psgraphics.blogspot.com/2016/01/process-for-speed-writing-
book.html)

~~~
phodo
Interesting idea of speed writing... "speed book", "agile book". Removes
inertia and barriers to creation. I read through the book (just a skim for
_now_). Very well done. I wonder if we will see more of this trend for certain
byte-sized topics. (<\-- ...see what I did there? )

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melling
"Since then I have written a bunch of ray tracers in Pascal, Fortran, Scheme,
C, C++, Java, and most recently Swift (which is awesome for writing ray
tracers). "

What makes Swift so good for writing ray tracers?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
What is the benefit of writing a bunch of different raytracers? Is it just an
exercise to practice a new language and reenforce your understanding of
raytracing fundamentals, or is there actually a notable difference?

~~~
berkut
32 years is quite a long time in computing terms!

Both the computing tech and raytracing/graphics theory and algorithms have
changed significantly over that time, with better algorithms and much more
powerful computing resources allowing more brute-force/accurate stuff to be
more practically done.

Writing a raytracer/renderer is also rather addictive, and it's quite cool
writing something which produces something else (as is writing compilers).

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GuiA
Author, any way I can buy it as a PDF?

~~~
petershirley
Not at present I am afraid. But I will confess I mainly pushed toward getting
it done and went with kindle because I knew that platform. I will do some
homework on this.

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douche
BTW, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free.

I think I know what I'm doing this weekend...

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phkahler
The sections listed don't cover acceleration structures. Thats critical to
performance on scenes of any complexity. Otherwise it looks like a decent
introduction.

~~~
dyarosla
They do mention BVH and then the image in the link goes on to mention KD-
trees. It's a ray tracer in a weekend. This I think is plenty to start with.

~~~
phkahler
I missed the mention of BVH - good enough. At the end it says something about
performance, which can't be achieved without something like that.

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amelius
Is this leveraging the GPU? Or is it more about the theory of computing
realistic images, without regard to performance?

~~~
dahart
The latter, it's about getting quick wins, getting up and running as fast as
possible, and having enough of a framework and enough fun by the end to be
motivated and capable of exploring any of the advanced topics for research or
production rendering that might tickle your fancy.

