21–30 of 49 posts
> January 15, 2021: A fourth edition is in the works. Progress on the text is coming along well and the source code is available on github. We expect that the printed version of the book will be out in Summer 2021. https://www.pbrt.org/
> January 15, 2021: A fourth edition is in the works. Progress on the text is coming along well and the source code is available on github. We expect that the printed version of the book will be out in Summer 2021. https://www.pbrt.org/
Why the dead-tree? Can we not try monetization of your book straight on the web instead, right here on your website? As developers we should lead the change away from pulp to electronic screens… Edit: I mean, 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!
Pedantic, but: Shouldn’t the title be “Physically-Based Rendering”?
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/165416/is-physic...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should we? I spend my life staring at electronic screens, it’s nice to not do so for reading round, or sit outside and do so. Maybe it’s an age thing, I used to have a lot more tolerance for this before my 30’s. Kindles are fine, but for leisure/fiction reading, or anything technical - it’s nice to be able to flip back/forth.
I agree with you on Kindles; they're certainly worse than having books on the open web, even if it were to be paid content. I also agree with you that page turning experience is _the_ native control of a book and that it adds to the saccadic perception of moving forward with time. B.t.w, I made this demo for exactly the reasons you mentioned, and I'm an older developer too!: https://bubblin.io/book/a-florida-sketch-b…
Edit: To be more constructive:
Physical reference books are often accessed in a non-linear fashion, and often not alone. But let's forget that second part and focus on non-linear.
How do people take a physical reference book and provide themselves with good non-linear access? Bookmarks, tabs, dog eared pages, margin notes producing cross-references if absent from the text proper. And they may even sometimes pull out all the bookmarks and tabs and start over to create an entirely different (for their use-case) reference text (by "hiding" irrelevant information). That's what needs to be recreated in an e-reader, not page flipping, to be useful for reference texts.
As a point of frustration I recently experienced, I was running a TTRPG game and had a PDF with bookmarks to various classes (the ones players were using) and spells (ones I was using) and combat mechanics (what I was running). I later used the same PDF as a player, and found that I had too many bookmarks that made it hard for me to find exactly what I wanted. If I just added more bookmarks relevant to me as a player (playing a class not in the game I was running) it would add extra info to the DM version of the reference, and all the DM bookmarks were largely useless to me as a player.
What I needed was a way to get two views of the same underlying text, with different sections emphasized or elided for my differing situations. Provide that in an ereader without having to make a copy of the PDF and manually mangle it (which I've done too) but rather just an overlay on the existing text and it'll provide a much better experience and start competing, realistically competing, with dead tree reference and technical books.
Of course, the inability to (without a large display or large number of displays) view multiple texts side-by-side is another problem. I don't want 10 e-readers (a guess at the largest number of texts I needed to view in parallel). I have my iPad, laptop, and a Kindle that I already sometimes use simultaneously rather than printing material off or buying physical books. It's painful to use things that way and a much harder to solve problem without insisting that people buy more and more hardware. Which becomes obsolete quickly, probably faster than most reference and technical books become obsolete.
> January 15, 2021: A fourth edition is in the works. Progress on the text is coming along well and the source code is available on github. We expect that the printed version of the book will be out in Summer 2021. https://www.pbrt.org/
Why the dead-tree? Can we not try monetization of your book straight on the web instead, right here on your website? As developers we should lead the change away from pulp to electronic screens… Edit: I mean, I'd be happy to pay the author (note, not donate*) for this corpus online.
As a developer I'm buying the physical copy, like I did the previous revision ( which is great btw )
Something not immediately clear to me is how to use the book. I see it uses a literate programming format, and it seems very well done. But I don’t see (in the first couple of chapters anyway) any code to show intermediate results. Am I supposed to work through the whole book before getting something that I can see? I’m sure I’m missing something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the dead-tree? Can we not try monetization of your book straight on the web instead, right here on your website? As developers we should lead the change away from pulp to electronic screens… Edit: I mean, I'd be happy to pay the author (note, not donate*) for this corpus online.
> 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!
I've never been an academic, and have struggled in school, so higher mathematics has always been a bit out of my reach.
This book has been the driving force behind learning trigonometry, calculus, linear algebra, sampling theory, and I'm sure much more.
In turn, those learnings have made AI/ML material more accessible to me as well.
I'm very much looking forward to the 4th edition!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with books? They last a very long time and they don't require any electricity to be able to read them? Do you have studies that have compared the environmental impact of both?
1. They last a long time has zero significance because the content is outdated in a year or less. 2. You don't need studies to know the difference between a natural habitat and cultivated land. And that the former is non-renewable. It looks like this comment is coming from one of those pulp-farming ambassadors spreading misinformation/whataboutism. This happens every time when a case for online publishing with direct…
2. You need something to base your opinion on though, preferably peer-reviewed scientific studies.
You read way too much into my comment.
For anyone looking for a more gentle introduction into ray tracing, I'd also suggest The Ray Tracer Challenge (http://www.raytracerchallenge.com/) -- it walks you through building a simple recursive ray tracer in a test driven development manner.
I started with the RTC, and moved on to PBR - and converting my recursive tracer into a unidirectional path tracer was quite an adventure -- one that continues to this day.
> January 15, 2021: A fourth edition is in the works. Progress on the text is coming along well and the source code is available on github. We expect that the printed version of the book will be out in Summer 2021. https://www.pbrt.org/
Why the dead-tree? Can we not try monetization of your book straight on the web instead, right here on your website? As developers we should lead the change away from pulp to electronic screens… Edit: I mean, I'd be happy to pay the author (note, not donate*) for this corpus online.