Every Wednesday in July, we are making pre-print PDFs of full chapters from the upcoming book Ray Tracing Gems II available free for download.
Every Wednesday in July, NVIDIA Developer is making pre-print PDFs of full chapters from the upcoming book Ray Tracing Gems II available free for download.
This week’s pre-print release is Chapter 14: The Reference Path Tracer, written by Jakub Boksansky and Adam Marrs. The addition of ray tracing to a real-time renderer makes it possible to create beautiful dynamic effects—such as soft shadows, reflections, refractions, indirect illumination, and even caustics—that were previously not possible. Substantial tuning and optimization are required for these effects to run in real time without artifacts, and this process is simplified when the real-time rendering engine can progressively generate a “known-correct” reference image to compare against. In this chapter, we walk through the steps to implement a simple, but sufficiently featured, path tracer to serve as such a reference.
Download Chapter 14: The Reference Path Tracer (PDF)
Ray Tracing Gems II, available for digital download and print August 4th, 2021, brings the community of rendering experts back together again to unearth true “gems” for developers of games, architectural applications, visualizations, and more in this exciting new era of real-time rendering. Rendering experts share their knowledge by explaining everything from basic ray tracing concepts geared toward beginners all the way to full ray tracing deployment in shipping AAA games.
Just like the first book, the digital edition of Ray Tracing Gems II will be free to download and the print edition will be available for purchase from Apress and Amazon.
We’ve collaborated with our partners to make four limited edition versions of the book, including custom covers that highlight real-time ray tracing in Fortnite, Control, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Quake II RTX.
To win a limited edition print copy of Ray Tracing Gems II, enter the giveaway contest here: https://developer.nvidia.com/ray-tracing-gems-ii