Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping 1st Edition

This book provides a excellent introduction to the subject of ray-tracing. It is well organised, and covers a lot of ground. To fully understand the technicalities you should be comfortable with intergrals, goniometry and linear algebra. However, this mostly applies to chapter two, and most material is quite easy to understand intuitively, I believe. After reading the book I felt that ray-tracing really isn't such a complex matter as I though it would be (although it is far from trivial!), and felt like it would be fun to try and write a ray-tracer as a hobby project. Regarding such a project, the book is all-inclusive, even providing some source code and data for some glass objects.Some more example images of ray-traced scene, even if black&white only, would make the book even more fun to read.

The content of the book is not a problem and is the definitive place to look if you want to implement photon mapping. But the physical quality of the book is so bad that it's literally down-right pirated book quality. You can get the same printing quality by just sending the original hard cover version of the book (which is unfortunately out of print and is sold at $270 by some sellers on Amazon) through a copy machine, and even then you still get better paper. I expected the paperback version of the book to have lower quality than the hardcover one, but didn't expected to be this low.

Photon mapping is an extremely powerful global illumination algorithm. It is probably the most important thing that happened to rendering in the last ten years, in my humble oppinion.Its inventer, Jensen did an exceptional job at explaining it with this book. The way the book is put togather is sublime. It goes into detailed explanation of the foundations and previous works in computer graphics to be pertinent rather than tedious. If you understand the math that he presented to you, great! But what's really cool is that the math will tend to make more and more sense intuitively as you read and implement the algorithm. You will probably need some form of computer science background (analysis of algorithms and at least one computer graphics course) to fully appreciate it. But anyone should be able to implement a photon mapper in C++ after reading the book. Jensen even gives you the source code for a photon map, all you need is to write a ray tracer.I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who is interested in computer graphics, especially if you are interested in rendering. Every CS student in rendering should write a hemicube radiosity renderer and a photon mapper... or at least own this book.

concise but clear and contains all the useful info, developing the photon mapping technique with a practical attitude through the course of the book, viewing related ideas along the way. its probably best if you already have some understanding of how BRDFs, monte-carlo, and raytracing work.one of the appeals of this branch of graphics is that the core concepts are simple and general - particles of light moving in straight lines and bouncing off things - something that is easy to grasp. but where this is so often clouded with equations when reading research papers, this book doesnt forget that computer graphics is about algorithms, and it explores those basic concepts in that way. mathematics just provides some checkpoints.at the end its become quite a complex system, but still not perfect. by then though, youll be wondering about your own possible extensions or variations... hmmm...if youve had an inclination to investigate the ray/path/particle-tracing side of graphics, or if you want to develop a high-quality renderer then this is a must have.(i think the marble bust is artemis. hail artemis!)

This book is not printed in Canada as look inside suggests. Instead of this even the hardcover version is actually printed on demand in UK and the quality of this printing on demand is unfortunately very poor. The text is almost grey, far from black, so it is quite hard to read. Otherwise I expect the content of this book to be very good.

Il contenuto del libro è molto interessante ancora oggi, e la tecnica descritta resta attuale e affascinante anche se con l'aumentare della potenza di calcolo a disposizione magari ora si preferiscono altri metodi. Il libro di per sé è strutturato piuttosto bene, avrei preferito però qualche spiegazione in più considerando che tutto sommato è un libro monotematico e molto del materiale che contiene era stato già pubblicato in vari modi (articoli e presentazioni si trovano tranquillamente su Internet). Quello che però butta giù il numero di stelle in modo significativo è la qualità della stampa: le figure sono molto poco definite, rigorosamente in bianco e nero e stampate su carta semplice. Sicuramente esisteranno eccezioni ma tutti i libri di grafica che possiedo, anche quelli stampati a risparmio, contengono almeno una serie di "plate" stampati a colori su carta lucida in modo da presentare correttamente al lettore quello di cui si sta parlando. Per un libro di questo prezzo e così piccolo trovo abbastanza inaccettabile aver risparmiato su un aspetto che è fondamentale quando l'argomento trattato è il realismo delle immagini prodotte! Per fortuna molte delle immagini si trovano su Internet a colori e miglior risoluzione, ma il piacere della lettura ne risulta comunque compromesso.

photon map発明者による同技術の標準教科書です。初めにglobal illuminationのための技術として、ray-tracingとradiosityを取り上げますが、後者は著者の目的に整合しないという意味で直ぐに切り捨て、その後はひたすら前者の道を突き進みます。到達点は必然的にmonte carlo ray-tracingとなりますが、それの問題を解決する手段としてphoton mapを位置づけており、話の道筋はこれ以上ないほど明確となっています。結論としては、第一級の研究者によるphoton map理解のための必要十分の記述であり、贅肉を削ぎ落とした内容は爽快感があります。本文は152ページと簡潔です。参考文献は豊富に挙げられていますが、本書の内容だけでも相応の基礎がある人であれば実装は可能かも知れません。付録にはサンプルのC++コードが付されています。注意としては、global illuminationの技法全てを扱っているわけではないので、例えばradiosityについて勉強されたい方には全く不向きです。