Customer Reviews

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation (The Interactive 3d Technology Series)

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Although it is not possible here, I am fairly sure this book deserves such rating. This is truly remarkable work and is likely to become a classic text in the field of computer graphics.

It is not a survey-type book, instead of trying to describe every possible method out there, the authors have concentrated on a few selected techniques, that are not only good (modern, fast, easy to implement, etc.), but also have some pedagogical merits and can serve as a gentle introduction to the world of ray tracing and digital image synthesis. Despite focusing on selected areas, the authors managed to squeeze here in an amazing amount of material. Among other topics, this book covers: subdivision surfaces, ray-primitive intersection acceleration techniques (3D DDA and kd-tree), color and radiometry, anti-aliasing, tone mapping, physically based reflection models, texture mapping (including texture anti-aliasing using ray differentials), area lights and HDR Image Based Lighting, volume scattering and much more.

A large part of the book has been devoted to the light transport and Monte Carlo techniques. One can find there an introduction to the theory of Monte Carlo estimation (including selected methods for reducing variance and computation time, like Russian roulette, multiple importance sampling or stratified sampling) and explanation of important light transport equations (rendering and transfer equations).

Finally the authors have described (and implemented) several solutions for the rendering equation: Whitted-style recursive ray tracing, direct illumination estimation, path tracing, irradiance caching and photon mapping.

However, it is not only the vastness of the material covered in this book, that causes this volume should be praised so highly. Perhaps, the style, in which this book has been written, is even more impressive. For each of the topics, the authors start with what is usually known as "dry math and theory", and then show how it is supposed to work as an algorithm (including its dirty details) and finally they explain how to turn this algorithm into C++ code. Each of those transitions concentrates on a small portion of the problem, so it is still easy to understand. Anyone, who had to turn a SIGGRAPH paper into something that works, will immediately recognize what kind of gem this book is - it actually shows how to do it!

This brilliant blend of theory and practice is one of its brightest spots, for learning the theory and math formulas is one thing, but writing a working, robust implementation is completely another.

Those, who prefer studying sources, will get source code of a very good, physically based, extensible ray tracer (called pbrt) with the best documentation one could ever imagine. Documentation that gives the rationale for almost every line of code. It shows not only how they did it, but also why they did it that way.

It is not the only book, that one will ever need - computer graphics is a vast topic - too big to be covered in a single volume, even as huge as this one. However, it is certainly one of the books that everyone interested in photorealistic rendering should buy. The price of this book is really low, if you think about it as of an excellent, first-rate computer graphics course.

Aimed at students, researchers and people interested in computer graphics algorithms, it is an indispensable book for anyone willing to write his own photorealistic (not necessarily physically based!) ray tracer and learn more about computer image synthesis.

This book mixes detailed algorithm descriptions with actual code in a book that never loses sight of the "big picture" of physically based ray tracing and image synthesis. Although it is very well written and is not a dry academic book at all, it would help if the reader is already familiar with basic computer graphic techniques, linear algebra, calculus, and optics in order to get the most out of this book. It was never meant to be a replacement for Foley & Van Dam's classic book on computer graphics, even though the first few chapters go over basic computer graphic material. The book includes a website where the source code of the authors' renderer can be downloaded. This code is very well organized and commented so that if you wish to lift individual pieces from the entire software package you can with just a little bit of work. I highly recommend this book to the programmer who wishes to implement physically based rendering in his/her own code or wants to know about the practical implementation of image synthesis techniques. Amazon does not show any details about the book here, so I shall explain the contents in the context of the table of contents:
CHAPTER 01. INTRODUCTION
This chapter talks briefly about all kinds of topics related to ray tracing. It also talks about how to understand the code in the book and the book website.
CHAPTER 02. GEOMETRY AND TRANSFORMATIONS
This chapter is pretty basic computer graphics stuff. It talks about coordinate systems, vectors, arithmetic, scaling, dot and cross products,etc. Applying transformations via matrices is also discussed as well as the representation of points, vectors, normals, rays, and bounding boxes.
CHAPTER 03. SHAPES
More basic computer graphics continues with discussions on spheres, differential geometry, cylinders, and disks, paraboloids, triangles and meshes, and the representation and bounding of all of these shapes.
CHAPTER 04. PRIMITIVES AND INTERSECTION ACCELERATION
This chapter is about accelerating the speed of your graphics through grid acceleration, tree construction and representation, and object instantiation.
CHAPTER 05. COLOR AND RADIOMETRY
XYZ color system is discussed along with radiometric integrals including integrals over projected solid angles, integrals over spherical coordinates, and integrals over area. Beginning in this chapter the math becomes more advanced.
CHAPTER 06. CAMERA MODELS
Projective camera models are discussed along with orthographic, perspective, and environment camera models. This information will already be familiar to students of computer vision.
CHAPTER 07. SAMPLING AND RECONSTRUCTION
Frequency domain techniques are discussed starting with the Fourier transform and ideal sampling and reconstruction. Also, antialiasing techniques are explained.
CHAPTER 08. FILM AND THE IMAGING PIPELINE
This chapter talks about topics such as luminance, photometry, bloom, and imaging pipeline stages.
CHAPTER 09. REFLECTION MODELS
The various reflection models are discussed including specular, Fresnel, Lambertian, Oren-Nayer disfuse reflection, and the Lafortune model.
CHAPTER 10. MATERIALS
Matte, plastic, bump mapping, and other material effects are explained very well.
CHAPTER 11. TEXTURE
We return to frequency models some in this chapter. The texture sampling rate, filtering functions, and mapping in spherical, cylindrical, and planar form are explained. Procedural textures are also discussed including the famous Perlin noise, marble, and windy waves.
CHAPTER 12. VOLUME SCATTERING
This chapter is considered more advanced material, and discusses volume scattering processes, absorption, emission, in and out scattering, phase functions, exponential density, and volume aggregates.
CHAPTER 13. LIGHT SOURCES
All kinds of light sources are described including point lights, spotlights, texture projection lights, distant lights, area lights, and infinite area lights.
CHAPTERS 14 and 15 both discuss Monte Carlo integration techniques including improving efficiency.
CHAPTERS 16 and 17 are about light transport. The first chapter is about surface reflection and the second is about volume rendering.
CHAPTER 18. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION includes a design retrospective, a discussion of abstraction versus reality, and design alternatives including triangles only and streaming computation.
APPENDIXES- These include sections on utilities, scene description interface, input file formats, an index of code fragments, an index of classes and their members, and finally an index of identifiers.

This book covers everything you need to know to write a ray tracer with
advanced features like photon mapping, volume scattering, path tracing,
etc. The scope of the material it covers is stunning. It starts from the
basics of topics like 3D geometry and ray/object intersections and then
builds up to explain reflection models, advanced texturing techniques, and
then light transport algorithms.

It has excellent discussions of the theory and underlying math of physical
rendering blended (rather well) with very very useful practical
implementations of the theory. The leap from theory to implementation is
often difficult to do, and to do well or efficiently even more difficult.
(The ray acceleration code alone is worth it's weight in gold.) This is an
indispensable book for anyone who wants to write their own ray tracer or
learn more about the latest techniques used in photorealistic rendering.

I do ray tracing and GI for a living. When I got started on my ray tracer I was struggling with several basic issues. Even though I tried to locate all the published material on those subject there was still significant gaps. Issues like 'how to shot photons', what about all these 'cosines'. How do you actually implement a kd-tree. I read Shirley's, Jansen's, Glassner's and Advanced Global Illumination and a lot of the older Siggraph papers. PBRT came out just in time to rescue me. It contains the only complete implementation of a photonmap.

It's strong point is a complete running GI engine. However the literate programming style used in the book meant a lot of time I cannot read a subject by itself. The use of abstract interfaces sort of force you to use the class browser to follow the logic. You pretty much have to read it from the beginning. The quality of the code contained goes beyond the usual standard of code published as examples. It contains a rather sophiscated random number generator. Its treatment of LDS plus sampling and recontruction in general is excellent. It is the only source that shows how to implement Li's algorithm to generate random rays to sample a sphere. Same goes for Malley's. Shirley and Chui's concentric sampling method is hidden in the appendix of a old Siggraph paper.

The book also has code to sample and model most of the common light sources. Which is surprisingly non-trivial.

I highly recommend this book but it does require a certain level of commitment to get the most out of this book. The chapters on sampling, ray differential, texture filtering, light transport I consider must reads for all graphics programmer even though you might not be working on ray tracing.

I cannot praise this book more than the others already have. The book is about producing high-quality images using raytracing. It basically walks you through the creation of a fully-functional raytracer, discussing all the different algorithms and techniques that are needed along the way.

It's written in the context of their particular implementation of a working raytracer, using the fweb programming/documentation system, where basically the program source and the documentation are written as one document. I've always thought this was academic nonsense as far as writing real code in a production environment, but it turns out to be an EXCELLENT way to write a book or code intended for a learning environment.

This strikes the perfect balance between explaining the theory thoroughly and showing how the ideas can be implemented in a real, functional raytracer. They avoid the trap of many other book that focus on a particular implemention, by not getting too bogged down into pecularities of their system.

The source code itself also stands out as a strong point. There are so many books out there with poorly written and unorganized code that you'd never want to read, much less try to work in. The code is well organized, and the coding style easy to read. It's one of the few books I own that contain source code where I actually read the source code and it added something to my experience. I wish everybody who wrote about programming was actually a decent programmer and not just a mathemiticion.

This book has academic rigor and but also well-written explanations. I'm still learning a lot from it. I expect to refer to it frequently over the next years as we (in the video game industry) take more concepts from raytracers and apply them to real-time graphics, as the processors get more and more powerful.

You probably should not be an absolute newbie when it comes to basic 3D math and things like vectors and basic graphics concepts before buying this book. The authors use some calculus, too, if that scares you off.

`Physically Based Rendering' is a graduate-level text in the algorithms and design techniques included in the authors' pbrt (Physically Based Ray Tracer) software that renders photorealistic 2D images from 3D coordinates using mathematical physics to calculate the effects of light on space.

It's not as daunting as it may sound, although at 1000+ pages of pretty dense text it's taken awhile to get through even a cursory first pass.

I can't honestly speak to the book's appropriateness as a textbook because I don't have the formal background in computer science or math. But as a reader with a longstanding interest in computer graphics (including ray tracing) along with experience coding in C++, I found the book accessible and interesting.

Ray tracing in the early nineties seemed downright magical when I first saw printouts a friend of mine generated on his Amiga. I just had to know how it was done and still have the first book I came across with usable code, `Advanced Graphics Programming Using C/C++' by Loren Heiny (Wiley 1993).

What struck me in the introductory chapters of `Physically Based Rendering' was that, although the Heiny book isn't mentioned in the extensive `Further Reading' list, the older book used the very same groundwork and illustrations of the camera model that physical ray tracing algorithms still use, albeit in a less math-heavy way I could digest back then.

My point is not to allege borrowing of accepted techniques but rather, if you've read other books on ray-tracing that focused more on practical coding than on theory, you should feel comfortable approaching a book such as this.

The authors make a key point in the `How To Use This Book' section I think would have been better positioned at the start of chapter one rather than the end, namely that potential readers may not be interested in the detailed minutiae of every algorithm used in the software. For this reason the authors wisely took an interface-level approach to describing the various components of pbrt and how they interact.

This was a smart piece of writing, otherwise I don't think I could have made it through the book, ignoring difficult parts yet confident I wouldn't lose the overall thread of the design. I wish more books of this depth took such an approach to serve a wider audience of readers.

That said, there is math here and if you aren't up to speed on integrals, functions, polynomials and vector analysis for example, you can skip them but this might not work as a first text in computer graphics.

There's also no denying that `Physically Based Rendering' is a book about software and if you don't know C or C++ you'll likely be at a disadvantage; not only is the code language-specific but the entire book is formatted as a literate programming document (a self-documenting file that can be compiled as code as well as to generate a documented listing in book-form). It's a format Donald Knuth created in the academic UNIX heyday that still has practical value, although I've no idea how widespread its use is.

In spite of the content, the writing in `Physically Based Rendering' is clear and down-to-earth and the authors seem genuinely interested in teaching design and implementation, rather than simply dazzling you which what the software can do (and don't get me wrong, with today's CPU horsepower and memory capacity, physically rendered scenes can be truly spectacular, as the cover of the book itself illustrates).

Downloading and using pbrt, its source code, and sample rendered scenes from the accompanying website is straightforward. I ran pbrt and built the code as a command line app on 64-bit Windows 7 using Visual Studio 2010.

`Physically Based Rendering' is a challenging book and one that I'm not sure I have the chops to fully appreciate, which is the only reason I gave it four of five stars. But I'd recommend it to interested and patient readers who have at least some coding exposure to ray tracing and related math and are willing to commit the time. I think you'll find the challenge worthwhile.

During my computer science studies just about the only time I had used calculus was in computer graphics. Vector calculus is important in surface area calculation, rendering, ray tracing. The difficulty of computing complex integrals can be eased by remarkable methods, such as the Monte Carlo integration, a subject, among many other subjects, thoroughly covered in this book. Very impressive book.

This book has about 1,000 pages (quite a bit more if you include the appendices). I got it with the intention of using it as a reference, so I will admit right off the bat that there is a lot of it I haven't read yet (and may never read). What I have read is very well written and is useful, practical information. Better yet, though, finding what you are looking for is very easy in this book because of all the cross referencing you will find all through it. Almost every page has a list of the topics discussed on that page and page numbers where you can go to read more about those topics. If you are just using this book as a reference, like I am, you will find that the information in this book is very easy to find and I'm confident you will find that data to be quite useful. Similarly, there are several appendices that help you find what you are after when starting from scratch. It's very well done. Recommended!

This is one superb book and the best on the rendering I've ever seen. It has excellent discussions of the theory and underlying math of physical rendering blended with extremely useful practical implementations of the theory. The ray acceleration code alone is worth the price of the book! Simply put... this is an indispensable book for anyone who wants to write their own ray tracer or learn more about the latest techniques used in photorealistic rendering.

For any developer that has experienced Alias|Wavefront Maya, Bryce or Softimage and wants to take the dive into nitty gritty of rendering engines you will find no better guide. Matt and Greg comprehensively cover more than a thousand pages of content and for each topic, whether it be cylinders & spheres, the refraction of different materials or the antialiasing techniques and in each case they show - by example - how the mathematical theories are applied in practice and how to convert the models into C++ with plenty of hands on opportunities with the pbrt ray tracer. pbrt itself is fairly robust and includes a great set of plugins such as a Maya Exporter to export scenes from Maya in the pbrt format.

Also of mention - the book quality is top notch with plenty of quality full color images which do justice to the 3d shapes & scenes. The paper can be a bit thin and see-through but that is the tradeoff to make a book of this depth.

Table of contents for the second edition:
CHAPTER 01. INTRODUCTION - pbrt: System Overview

CHAPTER 02. GEOMETRY AND TRANSFORMATIONS - Coordinate Systems, Vectors, Arithmetic, Scaling, Transformations Rays...

CHAPTER 03. SHAPES - Spheres, Cylinders, Disks, Triangles and Meshes...

CHAPTER 04. PRIMITIVES AND INTERSECTION ACCELERATION - Aggregates, Grid Accelerator, Bounding Volume Hierarchies

CHAPTER 05. COLOR AND RADIOMETRY

CHAPTER 06. CAMERA MODELS

CHAPTER 07. SAMPLING AND RECONSTRUCTION

CHAPTER 08. REFLECTION MODELS

CHAPTER 09. MATERIALS - Bump Mapping...

CHAPTER 10. TEXTURE

CHAPTER 11. VOLUME SCATTERING - Volume Scattering Processes

CHAPTER 12. LIGHT SOURCES -Light Interface, Visibility Testing, Point Lights, Spotlights...

CHAPTER 13. MONTE CARLO INTEGRATION I: BASIC CONCEPTS

CHAPTER 14. MONTE CARLO INTEGRATION II: IMPROVING EFFICIENCY - Russian Roulette and Splitting

CHAPTER 15. LIGHT TRANSPORT I: SURFACE REFLECTION - Direct Lighting, Path Tracing

CHAPTER 16. LIGHT TRANSPORT II: VOLUME RENDERING - Subsurface Scattering

CHAPTER 17. LIGHT TRANSPORT III: PRECOMPUTED LIGHT TRANSPORT - Spherical Harmonics, Radiance Probes...

CHAPTER 18. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

APPENDIXES