ABSTRACT
To improve on the rendering approach described in chapter 4 the first technique that comes to mind is ray tracing. There are other techniques for generating high-quality synthetic images but they will not be discussed here. Ray tracing may be slow but it does give superb, almost photographic quality, images and better algorithms are being developed all the time, so that under certain conditions it is even possible to achieve real-time ray tracing. There are many books that describe the theory of ray tracing in detail. One of the most cited books that comprehensively examines the physics of the rendering process is Physically Based Rendering From Theory to Implementation [70]. Watt [88] in chapters 7 and 8 covers all the basics of ray tracing and in Glassner [33] the story is continued. Shirley [80] specializes in realistic ray tracing. A full description of a complete package is given by Lindley [56] and there are also quite a few good publicly available freeware and shareware ray tracing programs with code that can be retrieved from many FTP sites and open source repositories.
