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Title: Realistic Ray Tracing, Second Edition by R. Keith Morley, Peter Shirley, Keith Morley ISBN: 1-56881-198-5 Publisher: AK Peters Ltd Pub. Date: July, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Comprehensive but no Introduction
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Crystal-clear for the serious programmer
Comment: I enjoyed this small, elegant book on how to write a modern ray tracer. As someone who has written his share of rendering programs, it's always a pleasure for me to see someone capture the essence of the idea as well as Shirley has done here.
Ray tracing is particularly well-suited to being broken down conceptually into bite-sized pieces, and this book uses that concept for its organization. Each of the 18 chapters covers a specific aspect of writing a ray tracing program. The writing and illustractions are clear and easy to follow.
There is no source code in this book, but there are a number of pseudo-code listings. The heart of most of the chapters is captured in the math. The essence of ray-tracing is in the details, and the mathematics capture those details precisely.
Though Shirley has boiled down the math to its minimum, the casual reader with no mathematical background will have trouble understanding the advanced portions of this book. If the sight of an integral sign spooks you, then it's probably a good idea to start with a more basic text. The math isn't gratuitous - this is the real, practical nuts-and-bolts stuff that you need to write a mature, modern renderer.
It's also great fun. Ray tracers are the simplest rendering programs to write, and there's nothing like seeing your own code producing beautiful images. There are plenty of references in the bibliography if you want to go further.
If you're ready to roll up your sleeves and implement a state-of-the-art ray-tracer, and are comfortable with basic calculus, this book will serve you as an ideal roadmap and reference.
Rating: 3
Summary: Second edition still full of errors
Comment: I had heard about how many errors this book originally had and assumed that these would be fixed for the Second Edition printing -- well, they weren't. There's a typo on nearly every other page, plus some serious formula errors.
Also, the book isn't very balanced. Some parts go into too much detail, and others not nearly enough.
I returned this book the day after I received it.
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Title: Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping by Henrik Wann Jensen ISBN: 1568811470 Publisher: AK Peters, Ltd. Pub. Date: 15 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $39.00 |
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Title: Advanced Global Illumination by Philip Dutre, Philippe Bekaert, Kavita Bala ISBN: 1568811772 Publisher: AK Peters, Ltd. Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $48.00 |
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Title: An Introduction to Ray tracing by Andrew Glassner ISBN: 0122861604 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: 28 January, 1989 List Price(USD): $79.95 |
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Title: Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley ISBN: 1568811241 Publisher: AK Peters Ltd Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $49.00 |
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Title: GPU Gems : Programming Techniques, Tips and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics by Randima Fernando ISBN: 0321228324 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 22 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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