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

This user has some interesting tutorials on ray tracing, these tutorials use C# I believe:

http://www.codeproject.com/script/Articles/MemberArticles.aspx?amid=3589667

I'm sure there will be some better tutorials, but this might be of interest.

Answer 2

"Ray Tracing from the Ground Up" by Kevin Suffern for getting started.

"Physically Based Rendering" by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys for a more advanced take on it when you've gotten comfortable with the basics.

And if you get really into it, the Ray Tracing News archives are a good read. Also, a lot of ray tracing enthusiast hang out at the ompf2.com forum.

Answer 3

I highly recommend reading the tutorials on https://www.scratchapixel.com/ they take the time to explain the physics and math behind things but also provide excellent code examples!

I used many of their tutorials when implementing my own ray tracer that I wrote in Java: https://github.com/bradforj287/brads-java-raytracer

Answer 4

Ok, I haven't found any perfect answers myself, that step through from the very basics; I have found a lot of simple ray tracers, and pointers to voluminous textbooks and academic references however.

I haven't tried these ray tracers, but they look interesting and simple.

http://www.barakcohen.co.il/2008/10/ray-tracing-simple-java-open-source.html

http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/archive/2007/04/03/a-ray-tracer-in-c-3-0.aspx

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/

From the ACM Cross Roads student magazine

http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds3-4/raytracing.html

This one in C++ is at least short; simplicity was lost for speed

http://ompf.org/ray/sphereflake/

A PhD Thesis on some aspects of ray tracing is here

A series of articles on DevMaster is here

The OMPF forum must read series of posts can be found here

It sounds like the book "An Introduction to Ray Tracing" is what I need ;-), and the authors home page is here for more graphics related programming.

Ray tracing from the ground up includes downloadable ray tracer source code too.

MiniLight is a minimal global illumination renderer.

SmallPT is a global illumination renderer, in 99 lines of C++, with a variant using single precision float on CPU and GPU in OpenCL.

Thanks to the other posters for the pointers

Answer 5

The advanced rendering class I took in college had the best designed projects I've ever seen. With the project helps and the lecture notes, all you need is on the website.

The basic idea is that it's really easy to make very subtle bugs in a raytracer, especially when you get into things like refraction. If you're just randomly creating a bunch of spheres in space, it's pretty hard to verify correctness or diagnose errors.

So, there's a parser that's easy to incorporate into your own code, and a bunch of diagnostic scene files. The first file is the easiest to get working (eye at origin, looking down one axis, a single sphere), and if you can render them all correctly, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a properly working raytracer.

Additionally, the parser uses the RIB format, which is Pixar's standard scene file format, and can be exported from pretty much any modeler.

It also explores distributed raytracing and path tracing, which can give you some really nice images.