NVIDIA recently published Ray Tracing Gems, a deep-dive into best practices for real-time ray tracing. The book was made free-to-download, to help all developers embrace the bleeding edge of rendering technology.
Ray Tracing Essentials is a seven-part video series hosted by the editor of Ray Tracing Gems, NVIDIA’s Eric Haines. The aim of this program is to make developers aware of various terms and concepts used in the field, while also inspiring them with dramatic and beautiful uses of the technology. This post is about the sixth video in this series, the rendering equation.
Arguably the most important equation in realistic computer graphics is The Rendering Equation. In this talk we show this equation and explain each term.
Pure tracing will always eventually give the right answer, but the key word is “eventually.” By using better sampling strategies, shooting rays where they can do the most good, we can dramatically cut rendering times. Doing so lets us use path tracing for even interactive games, such as Quake II.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- A raytracing resources page
- The free Open Access book Ray Tracing Gems
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 1: Basics of Ray Tracing
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 2: Rasterization versus Ray Tracing
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 3: Ray Tracing Hardware
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 4: The Ray Tracing Pipeline
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 5: Ray Tracing Effects
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 6: The Rendering Equation
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 7: Denoising for Ray Tracing
You can watch the all of the videos in the series on this YouTube Playlist.
On May 12, Eric Haines will present a live webinar about the Ray Tracing Essentials series. There will be a presentation, live Q&A, plus a giveaway of an NVIDIA TITAN RTX GPU (For live attendees only.) Sign up here: https://info.nvidia.com/developer-ray-tracing-webinar-reg-page.html.
