In Part 1: Basics of Ray Tracing, NVIDIA's Eric Haines runs through the basics of ray and path tracing. To begin, he defines a ray and notes how it is useful for different operations in computer graphics. Rays can be cast to test for shadows, for example. “In 1980, Whitted introduced the idea of recursive ray casting, known as ray tracing. Cook and others in 1984 explored how bursts of rays could create more elaborate effects, such as soft shadows and glossy reflections. Kajiya introduced the Rendering Equation in 1986, showing how it could be solved using path tracing,” explains Haines. “This whole field of ray tracing takes an extremely simple primitive - the ray - and explores how to most effectively use it to create images of unparalleled realism.” More details about this video can be found here: bit.ly/nvrttalk1
You can watch the all of the videos in the series on this KZfaq Playlist: • Ray Tracing Essentials
Ray tracing resources page: bit.ly/rtrtinfo
Ray Tracing Gems: raytracinggems.com
Additional Links:
Reference for the David Kirk quote web.archive.org/web/201112280...
A major portion of this talk was drawn from Peter Shirley’s presentation at the SIGGRAPH 2019 Introduction to Real-Time Ray Tracing course rtintro.realtimerendering.com/
The Star Wars image at the start is a still from the video Reflections vimeo.com/291876490
The first use of ray casting for computer graphics is by Arthur Appel in 1968 dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=14...
Whitted’s paper from 1980 dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=35...
The 1984 paper by Cook et al dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=80...
Kajiya’s “The Rendering Equation” dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=15902 paper
If you want more intuition on how path tracing works, see Disney’s entertaining 50’s-style film • Disney's Practical Gui... on the subject
Paul Heckbert www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/ made the business card, the front noting he is with the Dessert Foods Division at Pixar dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=37411