Customer Reviews

Advanced Global Illumination, Second Edition

5 star:		(5)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is, by far, the best global illumination theory/algorithms book available. The book covers techniques and theories that are at the foundation of all modern renderers. It also provides some nice psuedo-code that demonstrates how to translate theory into code.

The book does have some math, but it is VERY well explained(I'm not a math god by any means, yet I found the equations easy to follow because the authors build an intuitive understanding before hitting you with the equations). A basic calculus course is all you need to get through this book.

This book is NOT an Open GL, DirectX API book. It's a book that focuses on rendering techniques and theory, and it does a great job.

With this book you are not going to learn how to write a ray tracer. In general the book does not explain how to program things, it explains the theory behind different rendering techniques. The book puts together many things that have previously been published only in research publications. For a PhD student or researcher this kind of a book is really a relief as it makes it easier to gain overall knowledge of the science of global illumination.

This book thoroughly covers the macroscopic physics of light transport, hemispherical coordinates, and statistics, not to mention several global illumination algorithms in depth. Although it might not be a perfect introduction to the basics of ray tracing, stochastic ray tracing is covered as well. This book is probably best targeted to those interested in extending their ray tracers to include global illumination or those looking to understand the radiosity algorithm.

The collaborative effort of Philip Dutre (Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium), Philippe Bekaert (Max Planck Institut for Informatik, Saarbrocken, Germany), and Kavita Bala (Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University), Advanced Global Illumination is a straightforward, university studies level text concerning with and focused upon global illumination algorithms, which are most commonly used for creating realistic images in computer animation. Addressing the physics of light transport; stochastic path tracing and radiosity; Monte Carlo integration; approaches for turning theory and mathematical concepts into computer programming code; how to build a global illumination system; and much, much more, Advanced Global Illumination is a superbly organized and presented academic teaching tool and resource.

This review is for the second edition text, but I am putting it here since the page for that book does not yet yet have a place for customer reviews.

First off, the two prior reviews for this text are highly suspect. The text is basically a collection of highly complex mathematical formulas with little explanation. The physics, statistics, and calculus courses I took for my computer science degree were not nearly adequate preparation for this book. Even after dusting off my old math books and trying to refamiliarize myself with the content, the first few chapters were nearly impossible to trudge through. Perhaps this text could serve as a reference if you were already a professional in the field, but as any sort of learning aid, it is completely useless.

I think this one is the good, formal and systemic book for this area.