Tomas and I turned over all our final files for Ray Tracing Gems to the publisher on January 2, and we’re gathering edits from the authors. The Table of Contents for the 32 articles is now public. The publisher’s webpage is up. There’s an Amazon page in progress (BTW, the after-the-colon title, “High-Quality and Real-Time Rendering with DXR and Other APIs,” was requested by the publisher to help search engines find the book).

The hardback book should be available at GDC and GTC, with a free electronic version(s) available sometime before or around then, along with a source code repository. Also, the book is open access, under this CC license. This means that the authors, or anyone else, can redistribute these articles as they wish, as long as it’s a non-commercial use and they credit the book as the source.

Here’s the cover, which should be on the other sites soon.

By the way, if you want to read an article about ray tracing actual gems, this one is a good place to start. I happened upon it by accident, and it’s educational, approachable, and not dumbed down. The design criteria for a good gem cut are fun to read about: maximize reflected light as well as contrast, take into account that the viewer’s head will block off light, and so on. If you need a more serious paper from graphics people, there’s this article. Surprisingly, though fairly old, it is newer than any of the articles cited by the first, much newer article.