Information on Ray Tracing from the 3D category

ACM Crossroads: Ray Tracing - Article on Ray Tracing in the student magazine of the ACM.

All-Frequency Shadows - Ren Ng

Amorphous Phenomena Simulation - Papers describing various physically accurate simulations of complex amorphous phenomena such as smoke

Andrew Winter's Volume Graphics Publications - Andrew Winter's published papers discussing volume visualization and volume graphics.

Animation and Rendering of Complex Water Surfaces - Douglas Enright

Bagisas - A GUI the YAFRAY raytracer writen in Python. Downloads

Bidirectional Estimators for Light Transport - Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas study techniques for reducing the sampling noise inherent in pure Monte Carlo approaches to global illumination.

BMRT Shaders - Shaders from Larry Gritz's BMRT with examples.

Brassman's Modeller And Animation Links - Links to modelling and animation utilities

Carlos Urea Almagro's papers - A collection of papers regarding Monte-Carlo Density Estimation

Chuck's Ray Tracing Software - Personal page with links to programs for modeling

Computer Graphics Research Group - Research mostly center around global illumination and monte carlo ray tracing. Contains some environment maps

CoolRay - Open Source Raytracer with a scene description language that provides constructs for programming like loops and functions. Its written in C++ and runs on Windows and Linux/Unix.

Efficient and Realistic Hair Modeling and Animation Using Sparse Guide Hairs - Yizhou Yu

Efficient Image-Based Methods for Rendering Soft Shadows - Presents two efficient image-based approaches for computation and display of high-quality soft shadows from area light sources: Layered attenuation maps and coherence-based raytracing. Authors: Maneesh Agrawala

Eliminating Popping Artifacts in Sheet Buffer-Based Splatting - Splatting is a fast volume rendering algorithm which achieves its speed by projecting voxels in the form of pre-integrated interpolation kernels

Eric Haines' homepage - Links

FAQ for realtime raytracing - The FAQ about speed optimization for raytracing for use in realtime raytracing.

Flamingo - Plug-in for Rhino

FuzzyPhoton - The Raytracing Repository - Information about raytracing in general

Global Illumination Compendium by Philip Dutré - A compendium containing most of the useful formulas and equations for global illumination algorithms.

Graphics paper indexes - Indexes for online version of papers from SIGGRAPH and various other conferences.

GRT Raytracer - Raytracing system written in Common Lisp. It trys to become good classical raytracer: reasonably efficient

Henrik Wann Jensen's Publications - A list of publications mainly about Photon Mapping

Heuristic Ray Shooting Algorithms - Ph.D. Thesis by Vlastimil Havran. Describe a method to reduce a ray shooting algorithm's average-case complexity from O(n) to about O(log n) using kd-trees. Available in Postscript and PDF.

Image-based Rendering and Reconstruction of Surfaces with Arbitrary BRDFs - A project trying to capture the surface properties of real-life objects that cannot be effectively captured by any existing lighting models (such as Phong).

Improved Noise by Ken Perlin - An implementation in java of Perlin's 2002 SIGGRAPH paper (available in PDF format) describing a improved noise generating function.

Internet Raytracing Competition - Regular awards for best raytraced still images and animations submitted by the public. Site includes most recent winners

Introduction to Ray Tracing - The introduce of ray tracing. Also known as ray casting

Java Ray Tracer - Java ray tracing engine distributed under the GNU Public License. Images

Java Ray Tracer - Java ray tracing engine distributed under the GNU General Public License. Images

Jules Bloomenthal Published Papers - Papers relating to Character Animation

Kray - Freeware raytracer with subsurface scattering

Laurens Lapre's Webpages - Home of the Lparser

Light in C++ - A C++ class library available as source code implementing a physically correct renderer. Working on Unix and Windows.

Lightflow Rendering Interface - An object oriented library with API in C++ and Python for synthetic rendering

Metropolis Light Transport - Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas describes a method for solving the light transport problem that performs especially well on problems that are usually considered difficult

Philip Dutré's Publications - Mostly relating to global illumination algorithms and monte carlo light tracing.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Keller - Papers about Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo methods

Project BORG - BORG is a free network rendering system for RenderMan compliant renderers. It written in Java and comes with a graphical manager frontend.

Radiance - A raytracer trying to aid lighting designers and architects by predicting the light levels and appearance of a space prior to construction. It uses a hybrid approach of Monte Carlo and deterministic ray tracing. Available for Unix.

Radiance Technical Papers - Various papers describing the free radiance highly accurate ray-tracing software system for UNIX computers.

Radiosity: An Illuminating Perspective - Presents a summary of the state of radiosity research 1992 by S.M Drucker. In PDF format.

Ray Tracing Bibliography - Over 700 bibliographic references and some 300 abstracts from ray tracing related papers and books. Not updated since 1999 but much of the information is still useful.

Ray tracing in Wikipedia - A overview non technical article on ray tracing also covering some history of the subject.

Ray Tracing Introduction from SIGGRAPH - A basic introduction to building a ray tracer

Ray Tracing News Guide - Lots of information on ray tracing. Updated once or twice a year.

Ray Tracing on Programmable Graphics Hardware - Timothy J. Purcell

RayChase - Fast raytracer that will render random images and display them on the desktop. Tested on KDE

Rayshade - An extensible system for creating ray-traced images. It is written in C

RayTraccio - A Java ray-tracer running as a applet that wants to be simple and clean but nonetheless has some advanced features.

Raytracing-FAQ - Home of the comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing-faq with a online version.

Raytressi - Ray tracing library written in c++ with python bindings. Source code

Realistic Image Synthesis Engine - R.I.S.E. is an open source global illumination renderer for producing physically and biologically based photo realistic images. Product specifications

Realstorm - A realtime raytracing engine with downloadable benchmark

Realtime Raytracing Maillist - Discuss programming techniques

Renderpark - Test bed system for physically based photo-realistic image synthesis

RManNotes - General information on writing shaders

Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation - Eric Veach Ph.D. dissertation describes light transport problems in computer graphics and develops new Monte Carlo techniques that greatly extend the range of input models for which light transport simulations are practical.

Smoke Simulation for Large Scale Phenomenas - Nick Rasmussen

Symplectic Raytracing: Raytracing with Hamiltonian Dynamics in Blackhole Spacetime - PDF file describing a method to visualize the curved spacetime around blackholes. By Tetsu Satoh

Tachyon Parallel / Multiprocessor Ray Tracing System - A ray tracer distributed as C source

The DRay Ray Tracer. - A ray tracer supporting multithreaded rendering

The OpenRT Interactive RayTracing Project - A new interface that is supposed to become the OpenGL of interactive ray tracing. Contains publications

The Ray Engine - A paper by Nathan A. Carr

The Rearview Rendering Engine - A game engine aiming towards three dimensional computer graphics which fits both human perception and the shape of the real world better than common polygon engines do. Linux.

The Recursive Ray Tracing Algorithm - Explains how the basic ray tracing algorithm with reflection

Visual Simulation Group - Projects cover terrain modeling

vlib - An open source volume modeling and rendering library for unix. The interface facilitates the majority of significant developments in the field to date.

Volume Graphics: Field-based Modelling and Rendering - A PhD thesis in PDF format

VRay - Advanced raytracing system

Working with BMRT - Here are a couple of tips and programs to help integrate BMRT into Houdini.

YafRay: Yet Another Free RAYtracer - A free raytracing program. News

Yahoo Groups: BMRT - User list for users seeking advice

YASRT Raytracer - A simple raytracer in development