Ray Tracing Essentials, Part 1: Basics of Ray Tracing

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: http://bit.ly/nvrttalk1

You can watch the all of the videos in the series on this YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5B692fm6--sgm8Uiava0IIvUojjFOCSR

Ray tracing resources page: http://bit.ly/rtrtinfo
Ray Tracing Gems: http://raytracinggems.com

Additional Links:
Reference for the David Kirk quote https://web.archive.org/web/20111228090608/http:/www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Comments-Ray-Tracing-and-Rasterization-Debate?aid=530

A major portion of this talk was drawn from Peter Shirley’s presentation at the SIGGRAPH 2019 Introduction to Real-Time Ray Tracing course http://rtintro.realtimerendering.com/

The Star Wars image at the start is a still from the video Reflections https://vimeo.com/291876490

The first use of ray casting for computer graphics is by Arthur Appel in 1968 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1468082

Whitted’s paper from 1980 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358882

The 1984 paper by Cook et al https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=808590

Kajiya’s “The Rendering Equation” https://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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0 on the subject

Paul Heckbert https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/ made the business card, the front noting he is with the Dessert Foods Division at Pixar https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=37411

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