Real-Time Rendering

Over in r/OpenGL, r/GraphicsProgramming, r/gameenginedevs, I and most others recommend https://learnopengl.com/ https://raytracing.github.io/ https://www.realtimerendering.com/

For anyone really wanting to learn computer graphics in depth I recommend the book Real-Time Rendering[0] A great way to explore, play around with, and share shaders is Shader Toy[1] [0] https://www.realtimerendering.com/ [1] https://www.shadertoy.com/

You're welcome! Scratchapixel was new to me, so thanks for that link. PBRT (which you already have) is definitely a favorite. You also cited Graphics Gems IV but I enjoy dipping into all of them. Other suggestions: * http://tog.acm.org/resources/RTNews/html/ (Somewhat dead, but the archives are great) * http://ompf2.com/ (Active, lots of ray tracing specific discussion) * http://www.realtimerendering.com/ (I'm fond of the book as well) * http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/ (Especially the sections for "Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing" and it's successor, "High Performance Graphics") If I had to pick one, though, it'd be PBRT since it's a unified work that starts from the ground up.

This looks great, will have to check it out. I've always been interested in computer graphics, I even wrote a ray tracer when studying for my master. It was based on the, then, brand new book "An Introduction to Ray Tracing" by Andrew S. Glassner et al. The book is now free to download: https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/an-introduction-to-ray-tracing-…

> It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together Reminded me of the classic "HDR in games vs HDR in photography" comparison[0] [0] https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/

A good start would be the book Real-Time Rendering: https://www.realtimerendering.com/

See https://www.realtimerendering.com/books.html#recommended The RTR site is an incredible resource for anyone interested in the field. Note that their book ("Real-Time Rendering") is not an introductory text, but an intermediate overview that is best read after you've made yourself comfortable getting a few triangles on the screen using whatever API you prefer.

Much of that is mostly of historical interest. Today, either you're using the scene graph of some game engine, or you're down at the Vulkan and shader level, working on the engine and programming the GPU. A theoretical understanding of the whole pipeline is helpful for both, but how much of the old mechanics should be taught is a question. WebGL is easy for students to start with, since all you need is a browser. It's not really used much on the Web; most of the good demos are over 5 years old. Despite that, it's probably worth teaching WebGL simply because students can use it to get something they can show to others. Here's the Utah teapot in WebGL: [1] Udacity uses that example. Once students understand how that works, they probably know enough unless they intend to do game engine development. [1] http://www.realtimerendering.com/teapot/

Real Time Rendering maintains a list of high quality free resources including "Ray Tracing: In One Weekend" http://www.realtimerendering.com/#intro

For rendering rates measured in frames per second, maybe check out "Real-time Rendering", currently on its 4th edition. https://www.realtimerendering.com/ For rendering rates measured in seconds per frame, consider the "Physically Based Rendering Textbook", currently on its 3rd edition. https://www.pbrt.org/

Ray Tracing in One Weekend (http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing/Ray%20Tracing%20in%20a%20W… I love that it just sidesteps OpenGL/DirectX entirely

I will highly recommend ray tracing in weekend http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing/Ray%20Tracing%20in%20a%20W…

One option is to dive in with Peter Shirley's ray tracing intros linked at the top of http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html These will get you a quick overview and get something rendering. PBRT is a great follow up to really understand the physical underpinnings and get more into the theory of how to do things correctly and efficiently.

That book is great, but it’s discussion of graphical techniques is shallow (by design, it’s an overview book). Real-time Rendering was the book given to me back when I was first learning game development: http://www.realtimerendering.com/book.html

I sort of know this area.... There two separate paths -- realtime or non-real-time. For non-real-time there is: http://www.pbrt.org/ For real-time there is this: http://www.realtimerendering.com/ Neither book gets into the details of the specific API, they are theoretical. Real-time techniques change nearly complete about every 10 years because GPUs get faster and render more techniques possible and obsolete the older less good looking techniques.

For real-time rendering on modern GPUs, I recommend http://realtimerendering.com/book.html

Is that https://www.realtimerendering.com/?

Still worthwhile in my opinion! But full disclosure, I happen to be working on ray tracing problems. Writing them is still really fun, it’s no less useful today for learning things than it was 20 years ago. You can get amazing pictures with not very much code, and the algorithms are really satisfying to understand & implement. There are also still tons of low hanging fruit. You’d think the easy problems would be mined out by now, but they’re not. New developments are actively happening with intersection primitives, color handling, sampling, direct lighting, shadowing, the list goes on. If you want to do research, you don’t have to dive that deep to find something unsolved that is solveable. For an oblique cone intersection, I don’t know the right answer, but the oblique cone is a skew transform of a regular cone, right? You might be able to use a regular cone intersector, but pre-transform the ray by the inverse skew transform? This resource is fantastic for finding intersection building blocks and code examples: http://www.realtimerendering.com/intersections.html

The REYES algorithm isn't really the problem, you can just generate an acceleration structure and shade each shading point using ray tracing [1]. The REYES algorithm is just an algorithm that generates shading points and determines in which pixels those points are visible, it puts no restrictions on how you shade those points. The downside to mixing REYES and ray tracing is that you have to keep two representations of the geometry in memory, but that doesn't mean you can't combine the two. The main problem with RenderMan before version 19 was that it didn't have a good acceleration structure and that you basically had to implement a path tracer in RSL on your own. Pixar wrote a path tracer in RSL for Monster's University, so Disney could have just used that. I doubt that they would write their own renderer if they could have just asked Pixar to implement a better acceleration structure in PRMan, so there were obviously different reasons too. I think Ptex was an important reason for them to write their own renderer, as they seem to put a lot of focus on textures in their paper on the architecture of Hyperion [2]. Hyperion's architecture also allows them to use packet tracing and to load and subdivide geometry on demand, which is also really great. [1] http://www.realtimerendering.com/resources/RTNews/html/rtnv11n1.html#a… [2] https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/production/publicati…

This is a great resource. Some others along the same lines: TinyRenderer: https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/ ScratchAPixel: https://www.scratchapixel.com/index.html 3D Computer Graphics Programming by Pikuma (paid): https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-programming Ray-tracing: Ray Tracing in One Weekend: https://raytracing.github.io/ Ray Tracing Gems: https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/ Physically Based Rendering, 4th Edition: https://pbr-book.org/ I'll also link a comment[1] I made a while back about learning 3D graphics. There's no better teacher than manually implementing the rasterisation and ray-tracing pipelines. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46410210#46416135

Siggraph 2025 is in a few days, and I can see a few emerging technologies cross the finish line to be production software. https://s2025.conference-schedule.org https://www.realtimerendering.com/kesen/sig2025.html However, this isn't new, this happens every year..

Check out this old post: https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/ HDR in games would frequently mean clipping highlights and adding bloom. Prior the "HDR" exposure looked rather flat.

I first learned about them over a decade ago when people started getting chunks of their minecraft worlds printed out in color. The results were quite impressive. https://www.realtimerendering.com/erich/minecraft/public/mineways/comm… PCBway seems to be pushing more 3d printing and CNC services. I wonder if this ate into shapeway's profits?

Numerical Recipes was just several editions of one book, each with a few variants (for different programming languages). But you might be thinking of Graphics Gems (vols 1–5). https://www.realtimerendering.com/resources/GraphicsGems/

If anyone wants to make their own: The free e-book Ray Tracing Gems II [1] covers realtime GPU ray tracing with modern APIs and hardware acceleration, and has a chapter about spectral rendering (Chapter 42: Efficient spectral rendering on the GPU for predictive rendering). [1] https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/rtg2/

Track down the Graphics Gems series of books, it's what most of the game devs back in that era used to get tricks like fast square root, etc. https://www.realtimerendering.com/resources/GraphicsGems/

No downside to learning raytracing. Especially if you have access to a cluster to use as a render farm. DXR & OptiX are such rich APIs they actually inform theoretical optics and high energy photonics now! Ray Tracing Gems II http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/rtg2/

FYI here is Ray Tracing Gems I, also freely available: http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/rtg/index.html