Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition, describes both the mathematical theory behind a modern photorealistic rendering system as well as its practical implementation.

A method known as literate programming combines human-readable documentation and source code into a single reference that is specifically designed to aid comprehension. The result is a stunning achievement in graphics education. Through the ideas and software in this book, you will learn to design and employ a full-featured rendering system for creating stunning imagery.

This new edition greatly refines its best-selling predecessor by streamlining all obsolete code as well as adding sections on parallel rendering and system design; animating transformations; multispectral rendering; realistic lens systems; blue noise and adaptive sampling patterns and reconstruction; measured BRDFs; and instant global illumination, as well as subsurface and multiple-scattering integrators.

These updates reflect the current state-of-the-art technology, and along with the lucid pairing of text and code, ensure the book's leading position as a reference text for those working with images, whether it is for film, video, photography, digital design, visualization, or gaming.

The book that won its authors a 2014 Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
New sections on subsurface scattering, Metropolis light transport, precomputed light transport, multispectral rendering, and much more
Includes a companion site complete with source code for the rendering system described in the book, with support for Windows, OS X, and Linux: visit www.pbrt.org
Code and text are tightly woven together through a unique indexing feature that lists each function, variable, and method on the page that they are first described

About the Authors

Matt Pharr is a Software Engineer at Google. He previously co-founded Neoptica, which was acquired by Intel, and co-founded Exluna, which was acquired by NVIDIA. He has a B.S. degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graphics Lab, where he worked under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan.

Greg Humphreys is Director of Engineering at FanDuel, having previously worked on the Chrome graphics team at Google and the OptiX GPU raytracing engine at NVIDIA. Before that, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, where he conducted research in both high performance and physically based computer graphics, as well as computer architecture and visualization. Greg has a B.S.E. degree from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. When he's not tracing rays, Greg can usually be found playing tournament bridge.