Vaibhav Rathod's Notes

PathTracer Learning - Books and Tutorials

3 min read

  • Essential Books

    • “Ray Tracing in One Weekend” series — Peter Shirley (free online)
      • Book 1: Ray Tracing in One Weekend — basic ray tracer
      • Book 2: Ray Tracing: The Next Week — BVH, textures, motion blur
      • Book 3: Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life — Monte Carlo, importance sampling
      • URL: https://raytracing.github.io/
      • Best starting point — builds intuition before GPU
    • “Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation” (PBRT)
      • Pharr, Jakob, Humphreys — the definitive reference
      • 4th edition free online: https://pbr-book.org/
      • Covers everything: BVH, BRDFs, Monte Carlo, spectral rendering, volumes
      • Very dense — use as reference, not cover-to-cover
      • Chapter 9 (Reflection Models) and Chapter 13 (Monte Carlo) are essential
    • “Real-Time Rendering” — Akenine-Möller et al.
      • Chapter 26: Real-Time Ray Tracing
      • Good overview of hardware RT and denoising
    • “Fundamentals of Computer Graphics” — Shirley & Marschner
      • Good intro to the math before diving into PBRT

  • Key Papers

    • Kajiya 1986 — “The Rendering Equation”
      • Foundation of physically-based rendering
    • Möller & Trumbore 1997 — “Fast, Minimum Storage Ray/Triangle Intersection”
      • The standard ray-triangle intersection algorithm
    • Walter et al. 2007 — “Microfacet Models for Refraction through Rough Surfaces”
      • GGX BRDF derivation
    • Heitz 2014 — “Understanding the Masking-Shadowing Function in Microfacet-Based BRDFs”
      • Definitive reference for Smith G term
    • Heitz 2018 — “Sampling the GGX Distribution of Visible Normals”
      • VNDF sampling — better importance sampling for GGX
    • Burley 2012 — “Physically-Based Shading at Disney”
      • Disney Principled BRDF — the basis for most PBR workflows
    • Veach & Guibas 1995 — “Optimally Combining Sampling Techniques for Monte Carlo Rendering”
      • MIS (Multiple Importance Sampling) — essential for path tracing
    • Bitterli et al. 2020 — “Spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time ray tracing with dynamic direct lighting”
      • ReSTIR DI paper
    • Ouyang et al. 2021 — “ReSTIR GI: Path Resampling for Real-Time Path Tracing”
      • ReSTIR GI paper
    • Schied et al. 2017 — “Spatiotemporal Variance-Guided Filtering”
      • SVGF denoiser
    • Müller et al. 2017 — “Practical Path Guiding for Efficient Light-Transport Simulation”
      • SD-Tree path guiding
    • Woop et al. 2013 — “Watertight Ray/Triangle Intersection”
      • Prevents light leaking through mesh cracks

  • Video Courses

    • “Computer Graphics” — TU Wien (YouTube, free)
    • “Advances in Real-Time Rendering” — SIGGRAPH courses
    • “Introduction to Computer Graphics” — Cem Yuksel (YouTube)
      • Clear explanations of rendering fundamentals
    • “GAMES101” — Lingqi Yan (YouTube, Chinese with subtitles)
      • Comprehensive graphics course, excellent path tracing coverage

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