Resources to start with real time ray tracing

Path tracing aka. Physically based rendering (PBR) is a discrete light simulation that approximately imitates the continuous real-world light interaction using the approximate physics and calculus algorithm. The goal of this repository is to gather available resources that will help beginners start working in path tracing (PBR).

I will strongly recommend this website where you can find all the great resources available on ray tracing.

List of books (Personally Prefer)

1. Physically Based Rendering Book Online 👍🏼 👍🏼 Must Read
2. The Graphics Codex 👍🏽 👍🏼
3. Ray Tracing in One Weekend Series
4. Scratchapixel 👍🏼 👍🏽 Blog style
5. Ray Tracing Gems Series
6. GPU Gems Series

3D Model Archives

1. ORCA: Open Research Content Archive
2. McGuire Computer Graphics Archive 👍🏼
3. Benedikt Bitterli’s Rendering Resources 👍🏼
4. Stanford 3D Scanning Repository
5. Clara.io
6. HDRI light texture
   1. polygon heaven
   2. hdri heaven
7. From GitHub
   1. Commonly used Scenes and Assets
   2. few good 3D models
   3. ray tracing references

Computer Graphics YouTube Lecture Series Lectures:

1. Cem Yuksel’s Lecture Series
2. Justin Solmon’s Lecture
3. Computer Graphics at TU Wien
4. Ravi Ramamoorthi’s Lecture
5. Keenan Crane’s Lecture
6. Wolfgang Huerst’s Lecture Series
7. Rajesh Sharma SIGGRAPH 2021 ***

Developer’s Forums

• GameDev.net
• Rendering Technologies and APIs
• nvidia Developer Forums

Blogs Path Tracing

• unbiased unidirectional path tracing in 99 lines of C++ 👍🏽 👍🏽
• The blog at the bottom of the sea 👍🏼
• agraphicsguynotes
• memoRandom, in Japanese

Ray Tracing on Weekend (RTOW) series

• Peter Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend Series
• CUDA (porting code C++ to CUDA already makes it 10X faster)
  • Accelerated Ray Tracing in One Weekend in CUDA
  • Git Repo
  • CUDA with GLFW interop source mentioned
• OptiX
  • Joao Vitor Silva’s Blog
  • Joao Vitor Silva’s OptiX Path Tracer (OptiX 6.0)
  • Ingo Wald’s Blog, 2018
  • Ingo Wald’s Git Repo, older OptiX
  • David Crook OptiX 6.5
  • OptiX In One Weekend (older version than OptiX 7x)
• Unity
  • GPU Ray Tracing in Unity, C#
• RTOW in Rust

High-level API

1. OpenGL
   1. OpenGL loaders (creates function specification only)
      1. GLUT
      2. FreeGLUT (recommended by Prof. Yuksel)
      3. Glad
      4. GLEW (widely used)
      5. Other
   2. OpenGL Windowing APIs for OpenGL are below:
      1. GLFW: OWL already have it in 3rdParty Library
      2. Qt

         Low level APIs are (Ref.)

2. Microsoft DirectX 12 (DXR)
   1. NVidia Falcor (DXR based)
3. Vulkan Raytracing (VKR)
4. NVidia OptiX
   1. Project-OWL
   2. shocker-0x15

I am not sure about Metal and Embree so far.

1. Metal (MacOS)
2. Intel (CPU-based-renderer)
   1. Intel Embree
   2. Intel OSPRay

Some Popular Rendering Engines (for production) for ray tracing:

1. Pixar RenderMan
2. V-Ray
3. Cycles-Blender, with Blender, use OptiX backend
4. Autodesk Arnold, OptiX in backend
5. The G3D Innovation Engine, OptiX backend
6. NVidia IRay, OptiX backend
7. Luxrender, OptiX back end
8. Houdini, OptiX backend
9. openmoonray, Embree

For research

1. Mitsuba 3 Physically Based Renderer