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The Reference Path Tracer

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Ray Tracing Gems II

Abstract

The addition of ray tracing to a real-time renderer makes it possible to create beautiful dynamic effects-such as soft shadows, reflections, refractions, indirect illumination, and even caustics-that were previously not possible. Substantial tuning and optimization are required for these effects to run in real time without artifacts, and this process is simplified when the real-time rendering engine can progressively generate a "known-correct" reference image to compare against. In this chapter, we walk through the steps to implement a simple, but sufficiently featured, path tracer to serve as such a reference.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.

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Boksansky, J., Marrs, A. (2021). The Reference Path Tracer. In: Marrs, A., Shirley, P., Wald, I. (eds) Ray Tracing Gems II. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7185-8_14

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