Phys­ic­ally Based Ren­der­ing, 3rd Edi­tion, de­scribes both the math­em­at­ic­al the­ory be­hind mod­ern photoreal­ist­ic ren­der­ing as well as the prac­tic­al im­ple­ment­a­tion of a phys­ic­ally based ren­der­ing sys­tem. A meth­od—known as “lit­er­ate pro­gram­ming”—com­bines hu­man-read­able doc­u­ment­a­tion and source code in­to a single ref­er­ence that is spe­cific­ally de­signed to aid com­pre­hen­sion. With the ideas and soft­ware de­scribed in this book, you will learn how to design and im­ple­ment a full-fea­tured ren­der­ing sys­tem cap­able of cre­at­ing stun­ning im­agery.

This com­pletely up­dated and re­vised edi­tion in­cludes

• Sub­stan­tial new cov­er­age on bi­d­irec­tion­al path tra­cing with mul­tiple im­port­ance sampling, stochast­ic pro­gress­ive photon map­ping, Met­ro­pol­is light trans­port, float­ing-point pre­ci­sion er­rors in ray tra­cing, sub­sur­face scat­ter­ing, real­ist­ic cam­era mod­els, ray tra­cing hair and curves, mi­cro­fa­cet re­flec­tion mod­els, low-dis­crep­ancy sampling tech­niques, and much more.
• Ex­tens­ively an­not­ated C++ source code for a com­plete ren­der­ing sys­tem that im­ple­ments the al­gorithms de­scribed in the book. The code is provided un­der a lib­er­al open source li­cense along with a re­pos­it­ory of ex­ample scenes.

En­dorse­ments:

“Phys­ic­ally Based Ren­der­ing is a ter­rif­ic book. It cov­ers all the mar­velous math, fas­cin­at­ing phys­ics, prac­tic­al soft­ware en­gin­eer­ing, and clev­er tricks that are ne­ces­sary to write a state-of-the-art photoreal­ist­ic ren­der­er. All of these top­ics are dealt with in a clear and ped­ago­gic­al man­ner without omit­ting the all-im­port­ant prac­tic­al de­tails.”
Per Christensen, Seni­or Soft­ware De­veloper, Ren­der­Man Products, Pix­ar An­im­a­tion Stu­di­os

“This book has de­servedly won an Academy Award. I be­lieve it should also be nom­in­ated for a Pulitzer Prize.”
Don­ald Knuth, au­thor of The Art of Com­puter Pro­gram­ming

For the second edi­tion of the book, the au­thors were awar­ded a Sci­entif­ic and Tech­nic­al Academy Award by the Academy of Mo­tion Pic­tures Arts and Sci­ences for the im­pact the book has had on ren­der­ing in fea­ture in fea­ture film pro­duc­tion.