Physically Based Rendering, 3rd Edition

01: Introduction

Rendering is the process of producing an image from the description of a 3D scene. Obviously, this is a very broad task, and there are many ways to approach it. Physically based techniques attempt to simulate reality; that is, they use principles of physics to model the interaction of light and matter. While a physically based approach may seem to be the most obvious way to approach rendering, it has only been widely adopted in practice over the past 10 or so years. Section 1.7 at the end of this chapter gives a brief history of physically based rendering and its recent adoption for offline rendering for movies and for interactive rendering for games.

This book describes pbrt, a physically based rendering system based on the ray-tracing ...