Foreword

My adventures in ray tracing began in 1986. I owned an Amiga computer, and a friend came over with a floppy disk containing the C source code for a ray tracer written for Unix. I thought it would be interesting to try it out, so I got it to compile on my Amiga and rendered my first picture. It produced a black and white image of spheres over a flat plane. I was instantly mesmerized. The thought that a computer program was able to draw such a realistic picture was amazing to me. I adapted the program to render color images instead of just black and white and I found the result even more spectacular.

My journey into ray tracing led me to write my own ray tracing program called DKBTrace, which I released as freeware. I figured that I’d had fun writing it and I wanted other people to have fun using it. DKBTrace started to become quite popular in the late 1980s, so I worked with a group of developers to transform it into a ray tracer called POV-Ray. POV-Ray is now the most popular freeware ray tracing program available today. Although I haven’t done any development on POV-Ray since the early 1990s, the POV-Ray team has transformed it into a top-notch ray tracer capable of producing truly stunning images.

Now, Jamis Buck (no relation) has written a book showing how to write a ray tracing program of your own. His explanations are clear and fun to follow. He leads you through the development by writing tests first, then getting the tests to run. The book is programming language agnostic so you can write the ray tracer in any programming language you like. In fact, I wrote all of the exercises in Smalltalk—my favorite programming language. I was able to relive the excitement and the joy of building up a ray tracing program from scratch and viewing images I’d created by my software. This isn’t a book that you just read through. It’s a book that guides you to write your own programs. It takes you on a fun journey and gives you the satisfaction of creating your own stunning images.

Now I invite you to follow us on the journey. Along the way, you’ll learn about computer graphics and software development. You’ll learn the basic techniques used to render movies like Ice Age and Cars. Most important, though, you’ll enjoy the satisfaction of writing your own software that can amaze you. This book lays out the path and leads you along. Now it’s time for you to take the first steps. Enjoy the journey.

Author of DKBTrace and Coauthor of POV-Ray