Ray Tracing Gems: High-Quality and Real-Time Rendering with DXR and Other APIs

Book Description This book is a must-have for anyone serious about rendering in real time. With the announcement of new ray tracing APIs and hardware to support them, developers can easily create real-time applications with ray tracing as a core component. As ray tracing on the GPU becomes faster, it will play a more central role in real-time rendering. Ray Tracing Gems provides key building blocks for developers of games, architectural applications, visualizations, and more. Experts in rendering share their knowledge by explaining everything from nitty-gritty techniques that will improve any ray tracer to mastery of the new capabilities of current and future hardware.

What you'll learn: 

• The latest ray tracing techniques for developing real-time applications in multiple domains
• Guidance, advice, and best practices for rendering applications with Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR)
• How to implement high-performance graphics for interactive visualizations, games, simulations, and more

Who this book is for:

• Developers who are looking to leverage the latest APIs and GPU technology for real-time rendering and ray tracing 
• Students looking to learn about best practices in these areas
• Enthusiasts who want to understand and experiment with their new GPUs

Content

PART I: Ray Tracing Basics
Chapter 2: What is a Ray?
Chapter 3: Introduction to DirectX Raytracing
Chapter 4: A Planetarium Dome Master Camera
Chapter 5: Computing Minima and Maxima of Subarrays

PART II: Intersections and Efficiency
Chapter 6: A Fast and Robust Method for Avoiding Self-Intersection
Chapter 7: Precision Improvements for Ray/Sphere Intersection
Chapter 8: Cool Patches: A Geometric Approach to Ray/Bilinear Patch Intersections
Chapter 9: Multi-Hit Ray Tracing in DXR
Chapter 10: A Simple Load-Balancing Scheme with High Scaling Efficiency

PART III: Reflections, Refractions, and Shadows
Chapter 11: Automatic Handling of Materials in Nested Volumes
Chapter 12: A Microfacet-Based Shadowing Function to Solve the Bump Terminator Problem
Chapter 13: Ray Traced Shadows: Maintaining Real-Time Frame Rates
Chapter 14: Ray-Guided Volumetric Water Caustics in Single Scattering Media with DXR

PART IV: Sampling
Chapter 15: On the Importance of Sampling
Chapter 16: Sampling Transformations Zoo
Chapter 17: Ignoring the Inconvenient When Tracing Rays
Chapter 18: Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the GPU

PART V: Denoising and Filtering
Chapter 19: Cinematic Rendering in UE4 with Real-Time Ray Tracing and Denoising
Chapter 20: Texture Level of Detail Strategies for Real-Time Ray Tracing
Chapter 21: Simple Environment Map Filtering Using Ray Cones and Ray Differentials
Chapter 22: Improving Temporal Antialiasing with Adaptive Ray Tracing

PART VI: Hybrid Approaches and Systems
Chapter 23: Interactive Light Map and Irradiance Volume Preview in Frostbite
Chapter 24: Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping
Chapter 25: Hybrid Rendering for Real-Time Ray Tracing
Chapter 26: Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing
Chapter 27: Interactive Ray Tracing Techniques for High-Fidelity Scientific Visualization

PART VII: Global Illumination
Chapter 28: Ray Tracing Inhomogeneous Volumes
Chapter 29: Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer
Chapter 30: Caustics Using Screen-Space Photon Mapping
Chapter 31: Variance Reduction via Footprint Estimation in the Presence of Path Reuse
Chapter 32: Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching