I recently discovered a very interesting link on the „BlenderNation“ website about a very complex topic. First of all, I would like to thank „Bart Veldhuizen“ for the article or entry on „BlenderNation“.

What is it about?
At the end of the 90s, Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys, who were both still students at Stanford University at the time, started to learn how to write or program a „raytracer“. At the request of their lecturer at the time, Pat Hanrahan (I assume and that’s how I understood it), to write a book about this project, they both finally agreed. The first edition entitled „Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation“ was published in 2004. 3 further editions have been published since then, the second edition was published in 2010, the third edition in 2016 and the 4th edition was recently published in November.

It is all the more astonishing that this extremely comprehensive and very complex compendium has now been made publicly available to everyone. Although this great work of art is aimed more at students, professors and developers of render engines, normal users like us should also benefit from it. For all nerds who have always wanted to know how the core of a render engine works, how its many algorithms come into play and how a rendered image is created in general, as well as many other topics and anchor points, this is the perfect resource.

I haven’t read it all myself yet, but for me it’s a very exciting topic, even if I’m not a developer or programmer. This book gives very deep and complex insights into this topic and is also a work that should not be underestimated for beginners to generally understand what a render engine actually does, how it works and which processes are necessary under the hood so that we get a realistic rendering.

I don’t have any figures on how many people in our area have read this book or know about it. But I do think that this extremely great work and dedication should be recognized more. I can only do this in a small, modest way by mentioning and linking to it here.

PBR-BOOK.org