Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

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From movies to video games, computer-rendered images are pervasive today. Physically Based Rendering introduces the concepts and theory of photorealistic rendering hand in hand with the source code for a sophisticated renderer. By coupling the discussion of rendering algorithms with their implementations, Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys are able to reveal many of the details and subtleties of these algorithms. But this book goes further; it also describes the design strategies involved with building real systems—there is much more to writing a good renderer than stringing together a set of fast algorithms. For example, techniques for high-quality antialiasing must be considered from the start, as they have implications throughout the system. The rendering system described in this book is itself highly readable, written in a style called literate programming that mixes text describing the system with the code that implements it. Literate programming gives a gentle introduction to working with programs of this size. This lucid pairing of text and code offers the most complete and in-depth book available for understanding, designing, and building physically realistic rendering systems.

For a preview, download Chapter 7, "Sampling and Reconstruction".

News

October 12, 2009: We're having a contest to render the cover image for the second edition of the pbrt book---the best image rendered with pbrt submitted by December 1 will be featured as the image on the cover of the book. (See the full contest rules for more information.) We are also looking for excellent rendered images to help show off concepts like depth of field, indirect lighting, caustics, subsurface scattering, etc. Contact authors at pbrt dot org if you have an image you'd like to submit for these purposes.
October 7, 2009: An alpha release of pbrt version 2.0 has been released; see the readme file for more information. This version of the system corresponds to the version that will be described in the second edition of the book, which is expected to be available in August 2010. The system can be downloaded from the pbrt github page, either by clicking the "download" button or by using the git SCM system.
July 27, 2009: pbrt 1.04 is released: a number of bugs and incompatabilities have been fixed. Get it from the downloads page.
June 28, 2008: luxrender, a GPL Open Source fork of pbrt, has released version 0.5 with many new features, including full spectral rendering, bidirectional path tracing, a hierarchical material and texture system, displacement mapping, and much more.
November 18, 2007: Check out luxrender, a GPL Open Source fork of pbrt. The project seems to be off to a strong start and there are some amazing images in the gallery.
July 4, 2007: The long-awaited 1.03 patch release of pbrt has been released. See the downloads page.
August 12, 2006: A number of cool new renderings have been added to the gallery page.
January 9, 2006: Mark Colbert has updated his Maya plugin that exports Maya scenes to pbrt and renders them inside Maya to both support Maya under Windows and Maya under OS X.
May 17, 2005: A Mathematica-to-PBRT exporter has been released. See the downloads page.
April 25, 2005: The long-delayed first patch release of the pbrt source code has been released. This release fixes a number of bugs found by readers and the authors in the first 6 months after the book's publication. See the downloads page for links to the source code and information about the fixes in this release.
April 25, 2005: A new photon mapping plugin, implmenting many improvements to the photon mapping implementation described in the book, has been added to the plugins page.
February 14, 2005: Physically Based Rendering has won an Honorable Mention in in the Computer and Information Science category from the The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers Awards. The award winners in each category were selected for their unique contribution to scholarly publishing and are considered by the panel of judges to be the best of the best for 2004.
February 10, 2005: A handy debugging integrator has been added to the plugins page.