Physically Based Rendering: From Theory To Implementation [Hardcover]

This is not a comment about the book contents but simply a big warning for the digital format. Almost all equations were simply images scanned from the books. And reference links or cited pages were either wrong or dead. Why the hell there's a kindle version anyway? And such bad qualities and useless print still costs 58 USD, hard-cover is only 5 bucks more. I know I'm stupid, but please stop scamming money out of nerds.

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

This is a great book that enables programmers to build a functional raytracer for photorealistic rendering. This is not an introductory book! You really need to know the ropes to make something out of it, otherwise it is a waste of time.

The preface identifies the new aspects that make this edition different from the 1st edition. It is worth noting that the book includes no media, but directs you to the webpage of the book to obtain the source code you may need.

The book covers briefly the basic aspects of literal programming and photo-realistic rendering using real code as example, then delves deep into the formulation of a working raytracer, covering the techniques, algorithms and identifying potential pitfalls and shortcuts. A good thing about the book is that it is quite advanced and not aimed at novices, but, unlike other manuals in highly specialized fields, it is not a collection of research papers thrown together to beef up someone's resume. This is a well-crafted, for-real book aimed to professional renderers, researchers and advanced grad students in computer imaging and computer science.