This is the best technical book I have ever read

Photon mapping is an extremely powerful global illumination algorithm. It is probably the most important thing that happened to rendering in the last ten years, in my humble oppinion.

Its inventer, Jensen did an exceptional job at explaining it with this book. The way the book is put togather is sublime. It goes into detailed explanation of the foundations and previous works in computer graphics to be pertinent rather than tedious. If you understand the math that he presented to you, great! But what's really cool is that the math will tend to make more and more sense intuitively as you read and implement the algorithm. You will probably need some form of computer science background (analysis of algorithms and at least one computer graphics course) to fully appreciate it. But anyone should be able to implement a photon mapper in C++ after reading the book. Jensen even gives you the source code for a photon map, all you need is to write a ray tracer.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who is interested in computer graphics, especially if you are interested in rendering. Every CS student in rendering should write a hemicube radiosity renderer and a photon mapper... or at least own this book.

Other Reviews

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