3 Free Ray Tracing Ebooks

These books are for people who have already written a ray tracer as an entry portal into the world of graphics research. They cover path tracer’s probabilistic sampling in enough detail to get people up to speed to follow the literature and rendering trends.

They’re a how-to, to get you to a cool program as quickly as possible. They will not be a full-featured ray tracer, but they do have the indirect lighting which have made ray tracing a staple in movies. Follow these steps, and the architecture of the ray tracer you produce will be good for extending to a more extensive ray tracer if you get excited and want to pursue that.

When somebody says “ray tracing” it could mean many things. What I am going to describe is technically a path tracer, and a fairly general one. While the code will be pretty simple (let the computer do the work!) I think you’ll be very happy with the images you can make.

I’ll take you through writing a ray tracer in the order I do it, along with some debugging tips. By the end, you will have a ray tracer that produces some great images. You should be able to do this in a weekend. If you take longer, don’t worry about it. I use C++ as the driving language, but you don’t need to. However, I suggest you do, because it’s fast, portable, and most production movie and video game renderers are written in C++. Note that I avoid most “modern features” of C++, but inheritance and operator overloading are too useful for ray tracers to pass on.

I do not provide the code online, but the code is real and I show all of it except for a few straightforward operators in the vec3 class. I am a big believer in typing in code to learn it, but when code is available I use it, so I only practice what I preach when the code is not available. So don’t ask!