From movies to video games, computer-rendered images are pervasive today. Physically Based Rendering introduces the concepts and theory of photorealistic rendering hand in hand with the source code for a sophisticated renderer.
This book has deservedly won an Academy Award. I believe it should also be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize — Donald Knuth
The fourth edition is now available.
The full contents of the fourth edition are now freely available online.
Physically based rendering has transformed computer graphics lighting by more accurately simulating materials and lights, allowing digital artists to focus on cinematography rather than the intricacies of rendering. First published in 2004, Physically Based Rendering is both a textbook and a complete source-code implementation that has provided a widely adopted practical roadmap for most physically based shading and lighting systems used in film production.
(Don't miss Kristen Bell and Michael B. Jordan's tribute to physically based rendering.)
Physically Based Rendering, Fourth Edition describes both the mathematical theory behind a modern photorealistic rendering system as well as its practical implementation. A method known as “literate programming” combines human-readable documentation and source code into a single reference that is specifically designed to aid comprehension. Through the ideas and software in this book, you will learn to design and employ a full-featured rendering system for creating stunning imagery.
This new edition greatly refines its best-selling predecessors with a new chapter on GPU ray tracing; comprehensive coverage of the latest developments in volumetric light transport; new sections on spectral rendering; many improvements to the Monte Carlo sampling algorithms; a new bilinear patch primitive; thoroughly updated coverage of reflection models, including an improved representation for measured BRDFs; and much more. These updates reflect the current state-of-the-art technology, and along with the lucid pairing of text and code, ensure the book's leading position as a reference text for those working in rendering.
The author team of Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys, and Pat Hanrahan garnered a 2014 Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences based on the knowledge shared in the first and second editions of the book this book. The Academy called the book a “widely adopted practical roadmap for most physically based shading and lighting systems used in film production.”
For a preview, you can download Chapter 4, Primitives and Intersection Acceleration from the second edition, or Chapter 11, Volume Scattering and Chapter 14, Light Transport II: Volume Rendering from the fourth edition.
Matt Pharr is a Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA. He previously worked on VR at Google, co-founded Neoptica, which worked on programming models for graphics on heterogeneous CPU+GPU systems; Neoptica was acquired by Intel. Before Neoptica, Matt was in the Software Architecture group at NVIDIA, co-founded Exluna, and worked in Pixar's Rendering R+D group. He received his Ph.D. from the Stanford Graphics Lab, working under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. He was also the editor of GPU Gems 2.
Wenzel Jakob is an assistant professor at EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences. His research interests revolve around material appearance modeling, rendering algorithms, and the high-dimensional geometry of light paths. Wenzel obtained his Ph.D. at Cornell University under the supervision of Steve Marschner, after which he joined ETH Zürich for postdoctoral studies under the supervision of Olga Sorkine Hornung. Wenzel is also the lead developer of the Mitsuba renderer, a research-oriented rendering system.
Greg Humphreys is Director of Engineering at FanDuel, having previously worked on the Chrome graphics team at Google and the OptiX GPU raytracing engine at NVIDIA. Before that, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, where he conducted research in both high performance and physically based computer graphics, as well as computer architecture and visualization. Greg has a B.S.E. degree from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. When he's not tracing rays, Greg can usually be found playing tournament bridge.
You may contact the authors at [email protected].