Realistic Ray Tracing, Second Edition


Product Description
Concentrating on the "nuts and bolts" of writing ray tracing programs, this new and revised edition emphasizes practical and implementation issues and takes the reader through all the details needed to write a modern rendering system. Most importantly, the book adds many C++ code segments, and adds new details to provide the reader with a better intuitive understanding of ray tracing algorithms.Realistic Ray Tracing, Second Edition Review
The book "Realistic Ray Tracing" contains a description of all important ray tracing techniques and a guideline to the implementation of a ray tracing program. The book covers the basics like ray-object intersection, lighting, viewing and materials, but the major part of the text deals with advanced techniques monte carlo integration, antialiasing, soft shadows or path-tracing. The book contains only some 150 pages and each technique is thus described in 3 to 10 pages. The language used is clear and the book is very readable. It is very easy to read the whole book or just to pick a specific chapter and get an idea of one topic. The main focus of this book is the implementation of a ray tracer. All techniques are described in a way that enables the reader to easily code them. All the math needed is provided and procedural pseudo code fragments are given in some chapters. Despite being quite a thin book, the selection of topics is very good and most of the important ray tracing techniques are covered.There are some problems with this book though. First of all, this book does not describe the ray tracing algorithm very well. Readers completely unfamiliar with this method might have some difficulties understanding the overall picture. This is also true for the implementation part. Although a lot of techniques and basics are explained, the author does not cover the implementation of a ray tracing framework. Some of the chapters are simply too brief. The mathematical background is covered but not explained. In the first chapter, the author introduces 4-dimensional homogeneous coordinate systems without explaining them. This could have been done in 1-2 pages and would have helped to better understand a lot of the transformations used throughout the book. And the chapter about triangle meshes only deals with different approaches to store a triangle mesh. No word about the triangulation process itself. Overall, this is a lovely book that covers a lot of ray tracing techniques, but is is no introduction to this method. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews� Was this review helpful to you?�Yes No Report abuse | PermalinkComment�CommentMost of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Realistic Ray Tracing, Second Edition" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Realistic Ray Tracing, Second Edition ...

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