Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Ray tracing is an technique of computer graphics that creates images by shooting rays via a image-synthesis algorithm that determines the nearest object along a line of sight. Since the 1980s ray tracing has received a great deal of attention from researchers working to make ray tracing more tractable and to include more features. Suffern (information technology, U. of Technology, Sydney) describes how to write a ray tracer step-by-step, starting with design and programming and some essential mathematics and theoretical foundations, moving to such details as antialiasing, sampling techniques, mapping samples to a disk or a hemisphere, perspective viewing and developing a practical viewing system, nonlinear projections, stereoscopy, lights and materials, specular reflection, shadows, ambient occlusion, area lights, ray-object interconnections, affine transformations, transforming objects, regular grids, triangle meshes, mirror reflections, global illumination, simple and realistic transparency, texture mapping, procedural textures and noise-based textures. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.