What is Reddit's opinion of Ray Tracing in One Weekend (Ray Tracing Minibooks Book 1)?

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> Shirley's minibooks

I assume you are talking about this book ? I'm not familiar with it but any resources are good!

Learning D3D12 is good just be aware that it is easy to get bogged down in the "weeds" if you don't understand the full pipeline. The D3D samples are good to look at.

If you're interested in this I can recommend the Raytracing mini-books by Peter Shirley. I ran through them back in '16 and it is probably the most comprehensive intro book/tutorial I've seen. Does go heavy on the math and actually shows all the code needed.

https://www.amazon.com/Ray-Tracing-Weekend-Minibooks-Book-ebook/dp/B01B5AODD8

I've written a path tracer before, and I did it by modifying my ray tracer. A path tracer is really just a ray tracer that traces even more rays. The difference between them is really not that great. The same data structures can be used for either. There's a book called Ray Tracing in a Weekend, and it teaches you how to write a path tracer. The book's written by Peter Shirley, who's kind of an authority on the topic.

Nowadays, no one talks about ray tracing in the strict way that you do. People will some times refer to different things like path tracers, bidrectional path tracer, and photon mappers all as ray tracers. DirectX Raytracing is definitely not just limited to ray tracing as you described. If it was, it wouldn't be much use to anyone.

A bit of homework, but Ray Tracing in One Weekend is legendary (and free).

Disney’s short video on pathtracing can also help explain some concepts.

Another important thing is understanding the intersection that raytracing has with rasterization, since that is what consumers are seeing now with the new Turing cores. What the difference is, why people should care, etc.

It’s funny, I have been reading a lot online and observing people’s reactions to the new cards- and most of the backlash simply comes from not understanding what raytracing is. For graphics engineers in the industry, rasterizers (as brilliant as they are) always feel like a hack at some point or another- ray tracing is “the right way”, and that has us very excited

You can just use the compute functionality of Vulkan (no swapchain) and maybe accelerate it using either VK_KHR_ray_query or VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline. You could follow the NVIDIA ray tracing tutorials or you may take a look at Ray Tracing in one Weekend. There are also a lot of examples on shadertoy.

Pick up Ray Tracing In One Weekend, Author's Blog & Amazon. It's a fun little ebook that walks you through building a very small, fun path tracer. He codes his version in C++, but you can build it in any language!

I got the book over Thanksgiving and used it as an exercise to learn OCaml. I'll be revisiting the book anytime I want to a new language again.