Hughes/Computer Graphics, 3/E

Chapter 15. Ray Casting and Rasterization

15.1. Introduction

Previous chapters considered modeling and interacting with 2D and 3D scenes using an underlying renderer provided by WPF. Now we focus on writing our own physically based 3D renderer.

Rendering is integration. To compute an image, we need to compute how much light arrives at each pixel of the image sensor inside a virtual camera. Photons transport the light energy, so we need to simulate the physics of the photons in a scene. However, we can’t possibly simulate all of the photons, so we need to sample a few of them and generalize from those to estimate the integrated arriving light. Thus, one might also say that rendering is sampling. We’ll tie this integration notion of sampling to ...