ok, I should not repeat what people already said about the first edition - this book is definitely great, outstanding, and it covers both theory and implementation indeed

I also will not repeat what you can find in th preface - thanks to editor you can preview the book and find what it is about and how it differs from the first edition. The preview also contains three chapters, it is more than enough to give you an understanding what kind of book is it. So, please, no this "I whant to render nice pictures, and this book is full of formulas and program code" comments.

No CDs included, because the renderer source code is available on the book web site (mentioned in the introductory chapter)

I just whant to add something to "About the Authors" because things about them changed more than a little bit, and because you could not find this information here.

(from the back-cover)

Matt Pharr co-founded both Exluna (acquired by NVIDIA) and Neoptica (acquired by Intel), and has also worked in Pixar's Rendering R&D group.

Greg Humphreys is the software lead for the OptiX ray tracing engine at NVIDIA [OptiX is GPU-accelerated rt toolkit, you can find it on NVIDIA developer site - V.I.]

So, as you can see, the authors are trustworthy, at least in this area :).

If you are graphics programmer, hobby or pro, this is not a book to skip. In its paper form it is easily enjoyed during leisure time, and a great reference in the future.

I think seems be a very thorough discussion of PBR within the context of raytracing. If you are going to be working with real time rendering, you might be better off looking elsewhere. The math is quite advanced and assumes a lot of prior knowledge (a lot of it is above my head). This is definitely a graduate level text book.

When that kindle edition was on sale, I ordered that print replica version instead of regular kindle edition (mobi). I had a PDF-version copy for a while but they altered my digital order with kindle edition instead without my knowledge. Later kindle app automatically re-downloaded it from cloud storage. I ended up mobi version instead that it does not allow me to zoom anymore. However, Elsevier store website still offers PDF version for both editions of that book. That's why I prefer PDF version over MOBI version and I will order PDF version for both books (1st and 2nd editions) soon. Rated 1 star.

Also I have print book and reviewed book. That is very good information for ray-tracing programming but it is not for beginners. It requires knowledge of Calculus and Linear Algebra. I researched about that and found some interesting articles like realistic camera lens that uses complex mathematics to render everything as if real camera take photos. I am so impressed. Some day I will learn how to write a program to simulate real camera lens. Rated 5 stars.

Overall ratings: 3 stars.

I have spent a good portion of my career using software that performs physics based image rendering.

Now I get to learn it at a much lower level.

This will be a fun journey.

A must have book. Fullstop. The kindle version is so-so, poor rendering (...) of the equation.

This is not a comment about the book contents but simply a big warning for the digital format. Almost all equations were simply images scanned from the books. And reference links or cited pages were either wrong or dead. Why the hell there's a kindle version anyway? And such bad qualities and useless print still costs 58 USD, hard-cover is only 5 bucks more. I know I'm stupid, but please stop scamming money out of nerds.

"Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation" is aptly named. This text book presents a selection of modern rendering algorithms through the documented source code that eventually builds a complete rendering system called "pbrt".

"pbrt" is based on the ray-tracing algorithm. According to the authors this software has three goals in mind: it should be complete, illustrative, and physically based. Completeness meaning that there should be lacking features found in high quality commercial rendering packages, illustrative meaning that they tried to choose algorithms, data structures, and rendering techniques with an eye toward readability and clarity, and physically based meaning that the foundations should be based on the laws of physics and their mathematically expressions.

It should also be noted that the authors take the "literate programming" methodology first coined by Donald Knuth based on the idea that programs should be written more for people's consumption than for computer's consumption.

In order to get the most out of this text your should already have a strong background in computer graphics and are probably enrolled in a graduate level computer science program. Knowledge of vector geometry and transformations are assumed. Also experience with programs with tens of thousands lines of source code would be beneficial, in my opinion.

But if you think your ready, Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys deliver on their promise with over 1,000 pages building the "pbrt" rendering system from the ground up. You'll get a full course meal consisting of primitive acceleration, radiometry, sampling and reconstruction, reflection models, volume scattering, monte carlo integration, and light transport.

Overall, this can be an intimidating tome. I probably would not recommend this textbook to those that are wanting to jump right to section to learn more about a concept. Instead, you need to have a lot of time set aside to work though this book, which will consists of a lot of code writing. But if you have what it takes, I highly recommend taking the journey, for you will be rewarding with an exceptional understanding of the entire workflow of physically based rendering techniques.

This is not an introductory text. A good familiarity with general computer graphics concepts, mathematical notation and C++ is assumed. That is necessary since this book has a very large scope and tries to do many things. I personally really like the way code and text are mixed in this book, it feels very natural. There is a lot of ground that is covered, from basics of ray tracing to sampling theory, transformations, shading, BRDFs and more advanced topics like Monte Carlo sampling, Metropolis light transport, subsurface scattering and so on. As for the code, the authors only use a subset of the C++ language (as I imagine everyone does, since the language is so massive) and the code is quite readable. There are some concessions made for performance, but those are generally well-explained in the accompanying text. The book has a very solid amount of illustrations that help visualize things like ray-object intersections, acceleration structures and a lot of other things. This book is a remarkable effort to make advanced computer graphics and its implementation in code accessible and It does a fantastic job at that.

Este libro tiene de todo, está mucho más actualizado que Real Time Rendering (aunque ese también es un buen complement9, y contiene muchísimas referencias para continuar el estudio a base de otros libros y papers. Un libro para tener en la biblioteca, sin duda.

Libro molto dettagliato, con esempi di codice facilmente riutilizzabili.

Non proprio per principianti, richiede basi matematiche.

Carta patinata, su cui non si può facilmente scrivere note a margine!

Dieses Buch beschreibt ausführlich die Hintergründe und die zweckmäßige Implementierung eines Renderers mit dem Ray Tracing Algorithmus. Biased Rendering wird kurz gestreift, der Schwerpunkt liegt jedoch auf physikalisch korrektem, unbiased Rendering.

Es werden alle Bestandteile (Sampler, Integratoren, Metropolis Light Transport, BRDF, ...) eines Rendering Systems behandelt. Neben der Dardestellung im Buch gibt es auf der begleitenden Web-Site auch noch das komplette System im Quellcode samt zahlreichen Beispielszenen unter einer freien Lizenz. Selbst Grundlagen wie geometrische Datenstrukturen (Trees, Voxel, ...) zur effizienten Implementierung finden Platz.

In einer englischen Rezension wurde folgender treffene Kommentar zu diesem Buch samt der kompletten, funktionierenden Implementierung des Renderers abgegeben: jeder, der schon mal auf Basis eines Papers etwas implementieren musste, dass auch funktioniert, weiß wie sehr man dieses Werk schätzen muss!

In allen Kapiteln gibt es auch noch Übungen und Ideen für Erweiterungen sowie Literaturhinweise (so gehört es sich natürlich auch, ist jedoch leider nicht selbstvertändlich).

Abschließend sei noch das wunderschön gebundene Buch zum vergleichsweise günstigen Preis für so ein Spezialthema lobend erwähnt.

Zu meckern gibt es also nichts wesentliches. Der pbrt-Renderer hat sich inzwischen auch als Basis für zahlreiche Paper und Veröffentlichungen etabliert. Das saubere, objektorientierte und dabei doch performante Design und die einfache Erweiterbarkeit dürften die Hauptgründe dafür sein.

Nur ganz aktuelle Entwicklungen, wie z.B. Teile des Renderers mit OpenCL auf GPUs laufen lassen (die nächste Generation vom Blender Renderer wird dies nutzen, im luxrender gibt es auch erste Module dazu) oder auch SPPM ("Stochastic progressive photon mapping"), sind in diesem Grundlagenbuch noch nicht abgedeckt.

Great content. But the book Amazon sent me was dented and they claimed it was a transportation fault. Well, it wasn't me who chose the transporters. I've also had a package come completely soaked once. Good thing it didn't have a book inside.