The book Ray Tracing Gems is nearing completion, with the hardback version to be available mid-March at GDC and GTC. Our main goal with this book is educating developers at all levels about important concepts and the state of the art in ray tracing, with an emphasis on real-time rendering. You can see the full Table of Contents on this site, or order the hardcover version from Apress or on Amazon.

We wanted to make the contents available as soon as the chapters reach a finished state. The book is “Open Access,” under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND), “which permits use, duplication, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, a link is provided to the Creative Commons license, and any changes made are indicated.”

As such, we will be releasing a part of the book every few days, as we process them. These chapter are “preprints,” in that they will look a bit different than the publisher’s layout, but the information is the same, barring any last-minute fixes. By the end of February, the professionally laid-out electronic version of the final book from Apress will be available for free (formats to be determined), along with the code repository.

Ray Tracing Gems is not meant as a survey of the field of ray tracing. There are already fine books that provide a general education, many of them free; see this resource list, for example. Rather, this volume is more in the spirit of other gems books, such as GPU Gems, containing articles covering techniques that are often not discussed in general texts but that are important for high-quality results. The book also includes tutorials on newer technologies, along with guides that pull together best practices for solving specific problems. The second half of the book includes studies of larger systems focused on a variety of effects.

Part one of the seven parts of the book, along with the preface, forewords, contributors, and notation pages, can be found below. Enjoy!

Eric Haines & Tomas Akenine-Möller

Release date
Part I February 6th, 2019
Part II February 8th, 2019
Part III February 11th, 2019
Part IV February 15th, 2019
Part V February 19th, 2019
Part VI February 22nd, 2019
Part VII February 25th, 2019