An Introduction to Ray Tracing
An Introduction to Ray Tracing Every year since 1978 the computer graphics community has met at an annual five-day gathering called the SIGGRAPH conference. One of the highlights of the conference is a series of half-day and one-day courses on a wide variety of topics. These are intense days for audience and speakers alike, who are all excited to gether together to share information on some of the latest and most important developments in the field of computer graphics.

In 1986 I was a professional researcher working in ray tracing, and I thought I should gather together some of my colleagues to present a SIGGRAPH course on ray tracing. We split up the topics and created a day's worth of material. The course was a big hit, and we repeated it for a few years.

Since it seemed clear the people wanted to know this information, I thought we ought to gather together our course notes, refine them, and collect them into a book. We did, and An Introduction to Ray Tracing was the result.

I was pleased and honored that this book brought together some of the finest thinkers in the field. The other contributors, in alphabetical order, included James Arvo, Robert L. Cook, Eric Haines, Pat Hanrahan, Paul S. Heckbert, and Pat Hanrahan.

You can order the book directly through Amazon.

Here's the table of contents:

Preface
An Overview of Ray Tracing (Glassner)
Essential Ray Tracing Algorithms (Haines)
A Survey of Ray-Surface Intersection Algorithms (Hanrahan)
Surface Physics for Ray Tracing (Glassner)
Stochastic Sampling and Distributed Ray Tracing (Cook)
A Survey of Ray Tracing Accleration Techniques (Arvo&Kirk)
Writing A Ray Tracer (Heckbert)
A Ray Tracing Bibliography (Heckbert & Haines)
A Ray Tracing Glossary (Glassner)
Index

 

The book has received some very complimentary reviews. Here are some excerpts from Amazon - you can read them in complete form by following the link.

"This book is a classic - by which I mean that the coverage of the basics is so thorough and clear that even if new techniques are developed (and certainly they will be) this will be a great introductory text even when it's many year out of print."

"An Introduction to Ray Tracing" is an excellent nuts and bolts summary of the science and practice of ray tracing. Easy to read source code examples are included...The book is useful in a classroom environment or self-directed study."