Code in Three Dimensions.

Peek inside: a sampling of pages from the book

Bonus Material

Once you’ve begun working through the book, you can come back here to find bonus material—additional features, optimizations, and tips— all presented in the same test-driven format as the book.

The following bonus material is currently available:

• Rendering soft shadows. Learn how to implement area lights—light sources with physical dimension—to create soft, blurred shadows like you find in real life.
• Bounding boxes and hierarchies. Optimize your renderer for complex models or large scenes by adding bounding boxes and bounding volume hierarchies (BVH's).
• Texture mapping. Apply 2D patterns to 3D objects, and learn how to apply image data to your shapes. Take it a step further and implement skyboxes to add immersive realism to your scenes.

Here’s what everyone’s saying...

“Following in the footsteps of his book, Mazes for Programmers, Buck once again takes a challenging concept, presents it in an easy-to-understand format, and reminds us that programming can be both fun and rewarding.”
— Dr. Sebastian Raaphorst, Gemini Observatory

“This book is devious. Little by little, a test here and a test there, you'll create an incredibly sophisticated ray tracing library. Because each change is so small, your ray tracer will sneak up on you. That's the devious part: By the end you'll have built an amazingly complex piece of software, but it will never feel difficult!”
— Cory Forsyth, Founding Partner, 201 Created, Inc

“In The Ray Tracer Challenge Jamis Buck tames a difficult topic using an entertaining, practical approach that even the mathematically averse will enjoy. The test driven approach challenges and rewards the reader with experiences and artifacts that remind even the grizzled software curmudgen of the joyful moments in software development that inspired us to pursue engineering in the first place.”
— Justin Ball, CTO, Atomic Jolt

“Creating a ray tracer is a rite of passage that I recommend all developers endeavor to complete. Jamis does a great job presenting complex topics simply and allowing the reader to focus on the most interesting parts of the project. Working through this book is almost guaranteed to bring your programming skills up a notch.”
— Jason Pike, Director, Software Engineering, Atlas RFID Solutions

“The Ray Tracer Challenge is a delightful introduction to 3d lighting and rendering through ray tracing. Yes, there is math, but Jamis provides great examples and the exercises illustrate concepts in a way that is way more fun than any math class I took in college!”
— Matthew Margolis, Director, Software Engineering

“Taking the Ray Tracer Challenge was so much fun. Starting with some short tests, you'll create beautifully rendered images with just a little bit of math and code.”
— Justin Weiss, Senior Software Engineer, Aha!

“With this book, I can use what I learned at the university 13 years ago, and it is now fun! The Ray Tracer Challenge gave me back my joy for pet-projects. I recommend it to everyone!”
— Gábor László Hajba, Senior IT Consultant

“One of the tricks to avoiding programmer burnout is to find a passion project. In this book, you'll find exactly that: an awesome personal project that you can tackle regardless of your language background. Jamis' The Ray Tracer Challenge shows us that the best passion projects are shared.”
— Kevin Gisi, Senior UX Engineer