Further Reading

In a seminal early paper, Arthur Appel (1968) first described the basic idea of ray tracing to solve the hidden surface problem and to compute shadows in polygonal scenes. Goldstein and Nagel (1971) later showed how ray tracing could be used to render scenes with quadric surfaces. Kay and Greenberg (1979) described a ray-tracing approach to rendering transparency, and Whitted’s seminal CACM article described the general recursive ray-tracing algorithm that is implemented in this chapter, accurately simulating reflection and refraction from specular surfaces and shadows from point light sources (Whitted 1980). Heckbert (1987) was the first to explore realistic rendering of dessert.

Notable early books on physically based rendering and image synthesis include Cohen and Wallace’s Radiosity and Realistic Image Synthesis (1993), Sillion and Puech’s Radiosity and Global Illumination (1994), and Ashdown’s Radiosity: A Programmer’s Perspective (1994), all of which primarily describe the finite-element radiosity method.

In a paper on ray-tracing system design, Kirk and Arvo (1988) suggested many principles that have now become classic in renderer design. Their renderer was implemented as a core kernel that encapsulated the basic rendering algorithms and interacted with primitives and shading routines via a carefully constructed object-oriented interface. This approach made it easy to extend the system with new primitives and acceleration methods. pbrt’s design is based on these ideas.

Another good reference on ray-tracer design is Introduction to Ray Tracing (Glassner 1989a), which describes the state of the art in ray tracing at that time and has a chapter by Heckbert that sketches the design of a basic ray tracer. More recently, Shirley and Morley’s Realistic Ray Tracing (2003) gives an easy-to-understand introduction to ray tracing and includes the complete source code to a basic ray tracer. Suffern’s book (2007) also provides a gentle introduction to ray tracing.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a rendering testbed over many years; its design and overall structure were described by Trumbore, Lytle, and Greenberg (1993). Its predecessor was described by Hall and Greenberg (1983). This system is a loosely coupled set of modules and libraries, each designed to handle a single task (ray–object intersection acceleration, image storage, etc.) and written in a way that makes it easy to combine appropriate modules to investigate and develop new rendering algorithms. This testbed has been quite successful, serving as the foundation for much of the rendering research done at Cornell.

Radiance was the first widely available open source renderer based fundamentally on physical quantities. It was designed to perform accurate lighting simulation for architectural design. Ward described its design and history in a paper and a book (Ward 1994; Larson and Shakespeare 1998). Radiance is designed in the UNIX style, as a set of interacting programs, each handling a different part of the rendering process. This general type of rendering architecture was first described by Duff (1985).

Glassner’s (1993) Spectrum rendering architecture also focuses on physically based rendering, approached through a signal-processing-based formulation of the problem. It is an extensible system built with a plug-in architecture; pbrt’s approach of using parameter/value lists for initializing implementations of the main abstract interfaces is similar to Spectrum’s. One notable feature of Spectrum is that all parameters that describe the scene can be functions of time.

Slusallek and Seidel (1995, 1996; Slusallek 1996) described the Vision rendering system, which is also physically based and designed to support a wide variety of light transport algorithms. In particular, it had the ambitious goal of supporting both Monte Carlo and finite-element-based light transport algorithms.

Many papers have been written that describe the design and implementation of other rendering systems, including renderers for entertainment and artistic applications. The Reyes architecture, which forms the basis for Pixar’s RenderMan renderer, was first described by Cook et al. (1987), and a number of improvements to the original algorithm have been summarized by Apodaca and Gritz (2000). Gritz and Hahn (1996) described the BMRT ray tracer. The renderer in the Maya modeling and animation system was described by Sung et al. (1998), and some of the internal structure of the mental ray renderer is described in Driemeyer and Herken’s book on its API (Driemeyer and Herken 2002). The design of the high-performance Manta interactive ray tracer is described by Bigler et al. (2006).

The source code to pbrt is licensed under the BSD License; this has made it possible for other developers to use pbrt code as a basis for their efforts. LuxRender, available from www.luxrender.net, is a physically based renderer built using pbrt as a starting point; it offers a number of additional features and has a rich set of scene export plugins for modeling systems.

Ray Tracing News, an electronic newsletter compiled by Eric Haines dates to 1987 and is occasionally still published. It’s a very good resource for general ray-tracing information and has particularly useful discussions about intersection acceleration approaches, implementation issues, and tricks of the trade. More recently, the forums at ompf2.com have been frequented by many experienced ray-tracer developers.

The object-oriented approach used to structure pbrt makes the system easy to understand but is not the only way to structure rendering systems. An important counterpoint to the object-oriented approach is data-oriented design (DoD), a way of programming that has notably been advocated by a number of game developers (for whom performance is critical). The key tenet behind DoD is that many principles of traditional object-oriented design are incompatible with high-performance software systems as they lead to cache-inefficient layout of data in memory. Instead, its proponents argue for driving system design first from considerations of the layout of data in memory and how those data are transformed by the program. See, for example, Mike Acton’s keynote at the C++ Conference (Acton 2014).

References

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