Ray Tracing from the Ground Up [Hardcover]

Kevin Suffern (Author), Helen H. Hu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1568812728 | ISBN-13: 978-1568812724

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The 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. --Eric Haines, co-author of Real-Time Rendering

We've 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! --Peter Shirley, author of Fundamentals of Computer Graphics

Ray 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 goes into more than sufficient detail to deserve a place on the bookshelves of many professionals as a reference work...As such, I can heartily recommend this book to both professionals as well as students and teachers...Whether its intended use is as a ray-tracing reference or as the basis of a course on ray tracing, this book is essential reading. --Erik Reinhard, author of Color Imaging: Fundamentals and Applications

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 745 pages
• Publisher: A K Peters (September 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568812728
• ISBN-13: 978-1568812724
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #770,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > Computers & Technology > Graphic Design > Rendering & Ray Tracing

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great hands-on book to learn about ray tracing, October 22, 2009

By 

Eric Haines (Ithaca, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ray Tracing from the Ground Up (Hardcover)

Since Amazon has an excerpt of my review, here's the whole thing, from "The Ray Tracing News".

I recall when I was a kid in sixth grade I got my hands on some book that was essentially presenting all grade-school and high-school mathematics in just one text. I read through the first parts, feeling quite smart that I knew all this stuff already. I hit a little more algebra than I was used to, but was able to slog on. Then I hit logarithms and was stopped dead - what's this bizarre concept? The text whipped through it so quickly that I couldn't get my head around it, and so the book lost me entirely. Many books for courses are just that, texts for the classroom. They cover each topic just enough to get the point across to most students, and assume a teacher is around to fill in the gaps and help along any other students who didn't quite understand the book. A reasonable assumption, certainly, but of necessity it means the text will skim over areas in order to cover every major topic in a field and so appear "complete".

The book "Ray Tracing from the Ground Up", by Kevin Suffern, published by A.K. Peters, will be available at SIGGRAPH 2007. I've skimmed through most of the chapters (not as a paid editor, but rather just to comment), so can offer up an initial impression. This book has a perfect title for it. 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. Each chapter tackles some topic: perspective, reflection, intersection, etc. The text has many excellent figures and illustrative renderings, along with C++ code snippets that are explained when presented (vs. the often slap-dash nature of many code-laden books that present long, weakly commented listings that fill half the book). The book will come with a CD that includes a basic ray tracer, as well as code for generating various scenes (there's no scripting language front-end for the ray tracer).

Overall, the book is somewhat "old school". With the exception of a few newer topics, e.g. ambient occlusion, most of the material presented dates back to the 80's and early 90's. But this is as it should be for a text of this sort: fundamentals are established and built upon, with the author doing his best to make sure the reader truly understands what is going on each step of the way, (hopefully) without the need of a teacher to fill in the gaps. Through examples and extensive illustrations the author attempts to build not only a basic understanding but present mental models and give some intuition as to what various equations and algorithms represent. For example, I've never seen a clearer explanation of the ray/box (slabs) intersection method - it's done as it deserves to be done, walking through the various types of hits and misses and showing (through excellent colored figures and ray-traced test images) how the algorithm actually works. This is not a text for researchers or advanced students, but truly for the novice, the hobbyist, the enthusiastic amateur.

The style is informal and approachable, with the author normally speaking in the first person singular or plural, e.g. "I'll use the same representation for the BRDFs", "We need an expression for the primary rays". He assumes you're going to make a ray tracer, and he leads you through what you need to know and gets you coding it up. He points out variations and elaborations along the way. This approach is perfectly in the spirit of writing your own ray tracer, in which you normally have the drive of adding "just one more feature" that keeps you up until 5 AM. He even points out common pitfalls and ways to debug various features.

The book is not without its limitations. The coverage of some topics sometimes ends a little too quickly for my tastes. For example, the basics of efficiency grid creation and traversal are presented, but simple efficiency improvements such as mailboxing are not mentioned. Admittedly, mailboxing is not useful for multiprocessor systems, but I think it's worth mentioning as a handy idea in general.

As a test, I chose two terms, "radiance" and "Fresnel", and searched through the book to see how these are treated. The book does well with radiance, as it does a reasonable job defining the various types of radiometric units and draws the important connection between radiance and a sample ray. For Fresnel it mostly focuses on the Fresnel equation's effect on reflectance vs. transmittance as a function of angle. This is fairly important for a ray tracer, though the text rightly points out that it's often less noticeable than you might think. Where I find it important is for things like the surface of a pool or pond, where the effect of reflectance is low looking directly into the bottom while it increases as you look more towards the horizon.

The book presents the technique of making the specular color match the diffuse color to give a metallic look, vs. using a white specular color for plastics. It would have been nice to note that the Fresnel equation also is important in how metal and plastic differ in appearance. The Fresnel reflection effect, where at grazing angles all surfaces approach becoming perfectly reflective, is briefly mentioned indirectly when shading models are discussed. The book is interesting in that it does a thorough job of reconciling the Phong shading model, which is not energy-conserving, by reformulating it properly as a BRDF. However, Phong is as complex a shading model as is presented in the book. And this makes perfect sense within the context of what the author is trying to do: the "80% of the way, good enough for a start" Phong shading model is presented and put into the proper theoretical context. The author gives brief explanations and a number of references to more elaborate shading models. The focus of the book is to get the reader to the 80% level in a wide range of areas, with pointers where to go for more information if an area is of particular interest.

I could easily imagine this textbook being the basis for a basic or mid-level undergraduate computer graphics course. Such a course would necessarily ignore GPUs entirely, but the advantage would be in teaching first principles (light transport, BRDFs, sampling theory) and focusing on the scientific and mathematical concepts used in rendering as a whole. There are any number of areas that are not addressed by the book, such as tone mapping or BSP tree formation or procedural bump mapping. However, the basics are all there, and each teacher can elaborate on their own areas of interest. Those basics are carefully covered, with the proper theory and equations being presented without any dumbing down of the material. Questions and exercises are provided at the end of every chapter. The informative illustrations alone make the book worth purchasing by anyone planning on teaching or understanding more about the essentials of ray tracing.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good introductory book. I want to learn more., May 29, 2009

By 

Amazon Fan "Amazon Fan" (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ray Tracing from the Ground Up (Hardcover)

This textbook is expensive, but it's definitely worth the money if you are interesting in learning about ray tracing. It can be used as the basis of a college level introductory course on ray tracing and a scan of the web reveals that many colleges are indeed using it.
However, it is an introductory book and it doesn't delve into some of the topics as far as I would have liked.

Under sampling techniques (chapter 5), the author should have shown the algorithm used to scramble the canonical multi-jittered samples and he should have explained why that scrambling technique works. Chapters 13 (theoretical foundations) and 18 (area lights) are the most mathematically intensive chapters. I took courses in linear algebra and calc, but I got a bit lost in these chapters. It would have been nice if the author started out by summarizing the results of the chapter first and went into the mathematical reasons of why those results are valid. He should have said, here are the formulas you'll need to write your ray tracer. Now, here is where they come from. Those 2 chapters might be a roadblock for some readers. It's the kind of thing where you depend on a professor to break it all down in lectures. I am reading this outside of a course to learn on my own and I found those 2 chapters particularly difficult to get through. The book discusses designing 3D objects by unioning together 3D primitives, but it doesn't talk about intersecting or subtracting 3D primitives. The ambient occlusion chapter (17) is good, but the author fails to discuss the radius of ambient occlusion (local occlusion). The algorithm shown won't work within a closed room for instance. The only optimization algorithms discussed are bounding boxes explicitly placed into the world and regular grids (chapter 22). There are several other algorithms mentioned, but not discussed. Under tessellating a sphere (chapter 23.1), the author should have shown pseudo-code on how it was done. Also, it would have been nice to see how to make a geodesic sphere (Bucky Ball). Path tracing is discussed (chapter 26), but photon mapping is only mentioned. It's really disappointing not to learn how to do it. Concerning caustics, there are tricks dealing with fake shadows that could produce something like caustics. Instead of just disabling shadow rays for the sphere inside of the glass cube for instance, the author could have discussed better ways to fake it. The author mentions that affine transforms can be used for projection; however, he never shows how to construct a camera that uses affine transforms to project the 3D world onto a 2D plane.

On the book's web page, there are sample animations; however, the book never discusses how to generate animations. There is no discussion on how to produce animation files, how to simulate motion blur or how to generate optimization structures that can be reused between animation frames.

All of the books examples are written in C++, supposedly for efficiency and historical reasons. The C++ code is for the most part very clear and taking advantage of overloading of operators is sweet, but the book should be teaching algorithms. I would have preferred pseudo-code or Java or Python. I think conveying ideas to the reader is far more important than efficiency.

You should buy this book, but it will leave you with wanting to learn more and you'll have to go to more advanced books to fill in the missing details. It contains many excellent discussions on the topics. I especially liked the discussions on noise-based textures (chapter 31). I have been looking for a good description of Perlin marble for a long time. I wish an eBook were available.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for programmers, August 2, 2011

By 

MrGrieves - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ray Tracing from the Ground Up (Hardcover)

I bought this book a few years ago. I also have the first edition of the PBRT book. They are both excellent and I recommend both. Personally, I prefer this book because it is easier for me to understand. I think this book is more code oriented vs PBRT being more math oriented. Buy both, but if you're more of a programmer than mathematician get this one first. If you're already beyond the basics, I think PBRT would be more appropriate for you.