The Ray Tracer Challenge
A Test-Driven Guide to Your First 3D Renderer
| Price | $29.99
|
| Rating |  |
| Author | Jamis Buck |
| Publisher | The Pragmatic Programmers |
| Published | 2019 |
| Pages | 290 |
| Language | English |
| Format | Paper book / ebook (PDF) |
| ISBN-10 | 1680502719 |
| ISBN-13 | 9781680502718 |
Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! It's easier than you think. In just a couple of weeks, build a ray tracer that renders beautiful scenes with shadows, reflections, brilliant refraction effects, and subjects composed of various graphics primitives: spheres, cubes, cylinders, triangles, and more. With each chapter, implement another piece of the puzzle and move the renderer that much further forward. Do all of this in whichever language and environment you prefer, and do it entirely test-first, so you know it's correct. Recharge yourself with this project's immense potential for personal exploration, experimentation, and discovery.
The renderer is a ray tracer, which means it simulates the physics of light by tracing the path of light rays around your scene. Each exciting chapter presents a bite-sized piece of the puzzle, building on earlier chapters and setting the stage for later ones. Requirements are given language-agnostically; it's up to you to translate them into tests and code using whatever language you prefer. When the project is complete, you'll look back and realize you've built an entire system test-first!
There's no research necessary - all the necessary formulas and algorithms are presented and illustrated right here. Dive into intriguing topics from fundamental concepts such as vectors and matrices; to the algorithms that simulate the intersection of light rays with spheres, planes, cubes, cylinders, and triangles; to geometric patterns such as checkers and rings. Lighting and shading effects, such as shadows and reflections, make your scenes come to life, and constructive solid geometry (CSG) enables you to combine your graphics primitives in simple ways to produce complex shapes.
Play and experiment as you discover the fun of writing a ray tracer. Accept the challenge today!
- Jamis Buck
5 5 87
Similar Books
by Rod Stephens
C# is a multi-paradigm programming language. The Modern C# Challenge covers with aspects of the .NET Framework such as the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and CryptoAPI. It also encourages you to explore important programming trade-offs such as time versus space or simplicity. There may be many ways to solve a problem and there is often no si...
Price: $39.99 | Publisher: Packt Publishing | Release: 2018
by Eric Haines, Tomas Akenine-Moller
This book is a must-have for anyone serious about rendering in real time. With the announcement of new ray tracing APIs and hardware to support them, developers can easily create real-time applications with ray tracing as a core component. As ray tracing on the GPU becomes faster, it will play a more central role in real-time rendering. R...
Price: $32.82 | Free ebook | Publisher: Apress | Release: 2019
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition
by Luc Perkins, Jim Wilson, Eric Redmond
Data is getting bigger and more complex by the day, and so are your choices in handling it. Explore some of the most cutting-edge databases available - from a traditional relational database to newer NoSQL approaches - and make informed decisions about challenging data storage problems. This is the only comprehensive guide to the world of...
Price: $28.50 | Publisher: The Pragmatic Programmers | Release: 2018
by Chris Eagle, Kara Nance
The result of more than a decade of research and development within the NSA, the Ghidra platform was developed to address some of the agency's most challenging reverse-engineering problems. With the open-source release of this formerly restricted tool suite, one of the world's most capable disassemblers and intuitive decompilers...
Price: $36.04 | Publisher: No Starch Press | Release: 2020
by Marius Bancila
C++ is one of the most widely-used programming languages and has applications in a variety of fields, such as gaming, GUI programming, and operating systems, to name a few. Through the years, C++ has evolved into (and remains) one of the top choices for software developers worldwide. This book will show you some notable C++ features and h...
Price: $34.99 | Publisher: Packt Publishing | Release: 2018
by Holden Karau, Boris Lublinsky
Serverless computing enables developers to concentrate solely on their applications rather than worry about where they've been deployed. With the Ray general-purpose serverless implementation in Python, programmers and data scientists can hide servers, implement stateful applications, support direct communication between tasks, and a...
Price: $35.00 | Publisher: O'Reilly Media | Release: 2022
Remaining Relevant in Your Tech Career 
by Robert Stackowiak
Remain relevant in the face of constant change during your career in technology. This book shows you how to proactively plan in anticipation of future changes. Many people find technology careers enticing because of the number of job opportunities, the high compensation, or simply because of fascination with technology itself. Once in tho...
Price: $13.38 | Publisher: Apress | Release: 2019
by Brendan Burns, Kelsey Hightower, Joe Beda
Legend has it that Google deploys over two billion application containers a week. How's that possible? Google revealed the secret through a project called Kubernetes, an open source cluster orchestrator (based on its internal Borg system) that radically simplifies the task of building, deploying, and maintaining scalable distributed ...
Price: $15.97 | Publisher: O'Reilly Media | Release: 2017