Literature and tutorials for writing a ray tracer

Question

I am interested in finding recommendations on books on writing a raytracer, simple and clear implementations of ray tracing that can be seen on the web, and online resources

Answer 1

Have you seen povray? IMHO it is a very good starting point to understand ray-tracing (http://www.povray.org/)

Answer 2

The best one I have found is: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytracing_series/part1.php This tutorial does tend to move a bit fast, but it covers lots of aspects of raytracing.

Answer 3

If you are looking for a single good book that brings you from nothing to working code that can produce images, I started with Andrew Glassner's An Introduction to Ray Tracing. I can't get to Amazon right now but here is the relevant link.

Coincidentally, this is actually the book and problem domain that introduced me to object-oriented design. Boy, that was a while ago....

From there, I would recommend moving on to Pete Shirley's book, as the Wikipedia bibliography seems to imply. Actually, an even better suggestion is to take his ray tracing class. It worked for me!

Answer 4

A few years ago someone challenged me to do a Delphi port of a tiny ray-tracer (less than 200 lines of C code).

i ported it to Delphi, perhaps one day i'll re-port to C#.

Answer 5

This is a tool that may be useful for understanding and visualizing the general ideas of Raytracing: Raytracing Simulator

It is a simulator that I built for the Graphics course that I teach. Instead of rendering a 3D scene into a 2D image, it renders a 2D scene into a 1D image, which allows the visualization of the whole algorithm at once, letting you modify the parameters of the scene in real-time.

Answer 6

As said above, the best book you can possibly get is Physically based Rendering by Matt Pharr (check out www.pbrt.org). Explains a lot of algorithms in great detail, including advanced stuff like photon mapping. Moreover, it includes a fully working ray-tracer, so you can take a look at it. It also covers the math basics, so if you don't want to buy many books, I'd definitely recommend to take a look at this one.

It's much better than the classic books on this subject, as they tend to explain only the theory, not so much how to really implement it. For basics, any math book will do it, or you could try "Realtime collision detection", which also explains lots of intersection routines (which you will need in ray-tracing).

If you really want to start at the basics, you should try "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice", it's dated (some parts are really nonsense now), but it explains the basics pretty well. If you want a more recent book, try "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics", which contains the same, just not that detailed (should be good enough to get you started thou).

Last but not least, the wikipedia page on Raytracing is actually pretty good and should give you some starting points. Take a look at the external links section.