Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

With the increase in computing speed and due to the high quality of the optical effects it achieves, ray tracing is becoming a popular choice for interactive and animated rendering. This book takes readers through the whole process of building a modern ray tracer from scratch in C++. All concepts and processes are explained in detail with the aid of hundreds of diagrams, ray-traced images, and sample code. It is suitable for undergraduate and graduate computer graphics courses and for individual programmers who would like to learn ray tracing.

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.