Ray Tracing Basics

Dr. Steve Parker, who's academic team has done much to advance the field of ray tracing--specifically interactive ray tracing has allowed me host his lecture slides on my blog. Dr. Parker left the University of Utah earlier this year with Dr. Peter Shirley and several students to join nVidia in the hopes to produce high-quality, interactive ray tracing for consumers. Some have sourced Dr. Parker as writing the first "interactive" ray tracer, which he implemented years ago on some SGI computers.

These slides are taken from his CS 6620 - Introduction to Computer Graphics II course. It was basically all about writing fast and efficient ray tracers. The slides contain a lot of C++, but start with basic vector math. The slides have been compressed by me using Multivalent so they're quite a bit smaller than the originals.

The first lesson is a typical introduction to the course with pictures of ray-traced images and why ray tracing is useful. Those wishing to skip these details can probably jump into the second slide. They also include student project images including mine--the chess set. Most of these competition images lost a lot of quality for some reason--even uncompressed. You can see my image in an earlier post to see its original size and quality.

Also, if you use these slides, please keep the reference to Dr. Parker and his course.
Lesson 01 - Introduction to Ray Tracing
Lesson 02 - Geometry for Graphics
Lesson 03 - The Ray Tracing Algorithm
Lesson 04 - Ray Tracing Software
Lesson 05 - Ray Tracing Software
Lesson 06 - Ray-Object Intersections
Lesson 07 - Triangles and Materials
Lesson 08 - Materials
Lesson 09 - Materials II
Lesson 10 - Materials II
Lesson 11 - Materials
Lesson 12 - Heightfields
Lesson 13 - Sampling I
Lesson 14 - Sampling II
Lesson 15 - Color Theory
Lesson 16 - Texturing I
Lesson 17 - Texturing II
Lesson 18 - Displacement, Bump, and Volumes
Lesson 19 - Acceleration Structures
Lesson 20 - Acceleration Structures II
Lesson 21 - Acceleration Structures III
Lesson 22 - Acceleration Structures 4 Instances
Lesson 23 - Monte Carlo I
Lesson 24 - Monte Carlo II
Lesson 25 - Monte Carlo III