Viewing profile — mattpharr

Not just for software, but more generally for technology that influences the movie industry: https://www.oscars.org/sci-tech

Minimizing the ray payload for GPU was definitely part of why we didn't add that. (Though it does pain me sometimes that we don't have it in there.) And, PBR being a textbook, we d…

How would one link to a physical object? If this is what you’re asking: there are (perhaps too discreet) links at the bottom of each page to Amazon and MIT Press to purchase the ph…

In the 4th edition, there's no support for RGB rendering--it's always and only spectral. And admittedly the spectral rendering option in earlier editions wasn't great. We didn't al…

I love the Watt and Watt "Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques" book as well; it was IMHO the best book on those topics in its time.

The physical book was published 6 months ago, and per agreement with the publisher, the contents are now freely available online as well. The book's blurb: Photorealistic computer …

Also related as far as the programming model: C* on Connection Machines and the C dialect used on MasPar systems in the 1980s. There is some discussion in the ispc paper: https://p…

> I would expect a shader could do a credible job of emulating all of these. The key is that it is necessary to know the coherence of the light arriving at the surface in order for…

The irony of such a post on a website with the domain name “y combinator”…

Rejection sampling is not a good choice here. First, the cost is 2 FMAs * the cost of generating 2 random numbers * the number of rejection sampling iterations. On average, you rej…

FWIW that algorithm for uniform floating-point sampling in [0,1] is actually originally due to: Walker, Alastair J. “Fast generation of uniformly distributed pseudorandom numbers w…

> Are there alternative tools that focus on rewriting code to maximise performance while keeping error below some configurable bound? There are! See followup work by @pavpanchekha …

> I'd be happy to pay the author (note, not donate*) for this corpus online. Lucky for you, we have a Patreon. Looking forward to your support!

Yeah, about that prediction... Progress continues, but Fall 2021 is more likely for an online edition and then printed copies in the first half of 2022. (I suppose we should update…

Extra pedantic: no, because "physically" ends in "-ly". :-) (Rule 3 here: https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/hyphens.asp )

> It’s good for linear algebra with long vectors and large matrices, but SIMD is useful for many other things besides that The main goal in ispc's design was to support SPMD (singl…

No, the actual publisher (Elsevier) printed a batch of terrible quality books. This led to our ending our relationship with them. We are in the midst of finding a new publisher for…

(PBRT author, here) pbrt is the Physically Based Ray Tracer that is described in the Physically Based Rendering book.

So -20480 works out to be 0xAFFF. My trusty copy of "What's Where in the Apple", which includes a catalog of where everything is in memory, says that the routine to write the VTOC …

Workin' on it. :-) Note that the third edition came out roughly 5 years ago now, not 10.

Thanks! Also fixed and will also go live in a little bit.

Nice find! In general, you can send errata/bugs to authors@pbrt.org, but we got this one. :-) It looks like an equation that MathJax wasn't happy with. I've got it fixed now and wi…