Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

With the increase in computing speed and due to the high quality of the optical effects it achieves, ray tracing is becoming a popular choice for interactive and animated rendering. This book takes readers through the whole process of building a modern ray tracer from scratch in C++. All concepts and processes are explained in detail with the aid of hundreds of diagrams, ray-traced images, and sample code. It is suitable for undergraduate and graduate computer graphics courses and for individual programmers who would like to learn ray tracing.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Ray Tracing Design and Programming
Chapter 2 Some Essential Mathematics
Chapter 3 Bare-Bones Ray Tracing
Chapter 4 Antialiasing
Chapter 5 Sampling Techniques
Chapter 6 Mapping Samples to a Disk
Chapter 8 Perspective Viewing
Chapter 9 A Practical Viewing System
Chapter 10 Depth of Field
Chapter 11 Non-Linear Projections
Chapter 12 Stereoscopy
Chapter 13 Theoretical Foundations
Chapter 14 Lights and Materials
Chapter 15 Specular reflection
Chapter 16 Shadows
Chapter 17 Ambient Occlusion
Chapter 18 Area Lights
Chapter 19 Ray-Object Intersections
Chapter 20 Affine Transformations
Chapter 21 Transforming Objects
Chapter 22 Regular Grids
Chapter 23 Triangle Meshes
Chapter 24 Mirror Reflection
Chapter 25 Glossy Reflection
Chapter 26 Global Illumination
Chapter 27 Simple Transparency
Chapter 28 Realistic Transparency
Chapter 29 Texture Mapping
Chapter 30 Procedural Textures
Chapter 31 Noise-Based Textures