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.

Kevin Suffern is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), where he has been teaching since 1982. In 2003 he won an Individual Teaching Award for outstanding achievement in teaching computer graphics, in particular ray tracing. His artwork, which is produced using the ray tracer described in the book, has won two international awards, has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, and has been presented as a SIGGRAPH sketch.

" used draft chapters from Kevin Suffern's book for a number of classes at the University of Utah and they have been very useful. This book is timely as ray tracing is poised to become the dominant algorithm for graphics, and there is no other up-to-date introduction to that topic. Further, it is a very well written book with all the details needed to write your own ray tracer. This book is a must for any budding graphics programmer. I wish I'd had this book when I was starting out! -Advance Praise Shirley, September 2007 title of this book fits perfectly. Theory and code snippets are blended to show how to make a classical or stochastic ray tracer from scratch. It assumes the reader has just about no knowledge of graphics and at most some understanding of calculus. The informative illustrations alone make the book worth purchasing by anyone planning on teaching or understanding more about the essentials of ray tracing. -Advance Praise Haines, September 2007 taught computer graphics at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) by Kevin was critical for our careers at Animal Logic, and led to our work on the Academy Award winning film Happy Feet. Most importantly, learning ray tracing provided us with an in-depth understanding of shading algorithms. This knowledge was invaluable for our rendering, regardless of how we did it. It's great to see Kevin's ray tracing notes published in the book Ray Tracing from the Ground Up, as this allows a much wider audience to access the material. Kevin is able to draw on his many years of experience in the classroom to provide a comprehensive coverage of important rendering concepts. He has always presented clear explanations, colour illustrations and step-by-step instructions including source code. -Advance Praise Students, September 2007 Tracing from the Ground Up not only covers all aspects of ray tracing, but does so at a level that allows both undergraduate and graduate students to appreciate the beauty and algorithmic elegance of ray tracing. At the same time, this book g