Ray Tracing Books Online for Free
Two standard books on ray tracing are now available online for free:
- Matt Pharr announced the availability of “Physically Based Rendering”
- Eric Haines announced the availability of “An Introduction to Ray Tracing”
Even though personally I prefer reading such content on plain old paper, this is still great news for anyone interested in the subject. I can only congratulate the authors for taking this step.
In case of “Physically Based Rendering”, part of their motivation seems to be due to the low printing quality of the second printing of the third edition. I can only confirm this. I recently bought the 3rd edition and I was really disappointed by the lack of quality. Hopefully some publishers will learn a lesson or two from this, although I’m not too optimistic in this regard.