[HN Gopher] Ray Tracing Gems II available as free download
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Ray Tracing Gems II available as free download
Author : dagmx
Score : 126 points
Date : 2021-08-04 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.nvidia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.nvidia.com)
| trevortheblack wrote:
| This was a significant part of the last year of my life.
|
| I'm super glad it's finally getting out to readers. I think that
| Adam, Ingo and Peter did a fantastic job bringing all of this
| together over the course of the last 18 months.
| jumelles wrote:
| Direct PDF link, 262 MB:
|
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-4842-7...
| okamiueru wrote:
| This is a surprisingly well put together book. I'm no expert in
| the field, but it covers a lot of topics well, and doesn't seem
| to be too nvidia-biased either.
|
| It's a pity that the code examples are not licensed for
| commercial use.
| kragen wrote:
| Not just "free" as in beer; free as in "Creative Commons
| Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND)"! You can put
| the book up on your own web site! They're a little confused,
| though; they specify "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0", which is
| CC-BY, but also "CC-BY-NC-ND", which is Attribution-
| NonCommercial-NoDerivatives; and then they explain, "allows you
| to freely copy and redistribute any chapter, or the whole book,
| as long as you give appropriate credit and you are not using it
| for commercial purposes", which would be CC-BY-NC (Attribution-
| NonCommercial).
|
| The actual book download link seems to be
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-4842-7...
| for now (884 pp., 262 MB!, md5sum
| 0e23ade6512d9a3ffa97a17d45521563). At the moment, the book itself
| claims to be CC-BY-NC-ND on the colophon page, but then later
| repeats the above confused text from the web page with its three
| conflicting licenses.
|
| The book content is SUPER SWEET. :)
|
| When I was a kid I was really fascinated with POVRay, but my 286
| was too slow to make it very much fun. And I sucked at
| programming. A few years ago I wrote
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytra...
| and it was _amazing_. 200 lines of C, one night of hacking, was
| enough to get from floating-point arithmetic, scanf, and putchar,
| to gorgeous glowing shining spheres. And it took _under a
| second_. On my _netbook_. Fucking _magic_.
|
| But the techniques in this book enable orders of magnitude more
| amazing stuff than that!
|
| If you're writing this stuff in GLSL instead of C, aside from the
| speed, you can save about 15% of the code --- you don't have to
| waste 20 lines on teaching C how to do math with 3-vectors, you
| can write v - w instead of sub(v, w), you don't have to spend 8
| lines on teaching C how to write a PPM file, and you can
| immediately see the results on the screen. But parsing an input
| scene file is gonna be a little tougher.
|
| That program is just a standard Whitted-style raytracer.
| (Interestingly, Whitted works at NVIDIA now.) More recently, I
| wrote a minimal SDF ray tracer instead, in Lua; it's a _lot_ less
| code:
| https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/sdf.lu...
| shric wrote:
| I think you meant raymarcher, not raytracer in the last
| sentence
| huachimingo wrote:
| See also "Graphic Gems" book series.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And the now outdated Cg, it is still interesting read.
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| Is ray-tracing the iterative improvement that requires we keep
| buying new graphics cards every two years for the foreseeable
| future? Perhaps nVidia has found another avenue to keep selling
| chips to gamers at a normal cadence post moore's law. Obviously
| they have no trouble selling chips for crypto farms or AI
| applications however it seems like game performance stays
| acceptable on older cards longer than back in the 2000's and
| early 2010's
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| The Springer site just hangs when I click on the download link...
| samus wrote:
| It's a big file, and they just have been Hackernews'ed...
| flakiness wrote:
| FYI here is Ray Tracing Gems I, also freely available:
| http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/rtg/index.ht...
| corysama wrote:
| And, more! http://www.realtimerendering.com/books.html
| codetrotter wrote:
| Kind of weird how one of the books hosted on that site is a
| PDF that carries the mark of the LRN piracy group though.
|
| Reminds me of that time when it was found that Nintendo used
| some pirate ROMs in one of their emulation based products.
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