Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 5

Sampling Techniques

Image courtesy of Duy Tran

Objectives

By the end of this chapter you should:

• understand why sampling is important in ray tracing;
• understand how several common sampling techniques are implemented;
• know the characteristics of good sampling techniques;
• have at your disposal a flexible sampling architecture.

In the previous chapter, I hard-wired a few simple sampling patterns into the World::render_scene function to perform antialiasing. There is, however, a lot more to sampling than antialiasing, because all of ray tracing is essentially an exercise in sampling and reconstruction. It’s not only pixels that have ...