I love free. The first two of the seven parts that make up Ray Tracing Gems are now available in preprint form from NVIDIA’s Developer Zone. Each of the remaining parts will be released every three or four days through February.

The links: the PDF download page (login needed), NVIDIA’s first post about it, their second post, and the Table of Contents

We just finished the first major round of going through the proofs. Lots of little (and a few big) fixes, and there’s another round soon, then the book gets published. But, the goal all along has been to get the finished and corrected articles out to developers sooner rather than later, so NVIDIA’s releasing preprints this month. You do need to sign on to the Developer Zone to download them, but that’s a minute to sign up for a free account, and anyone can do so.

Since NVIDIA paid for the book to be open access, it’s entirely fine to redistribute these PDFs – it’s a brave new world in publishing, I tell ya. The first page of each PDF explains the license, also noted in my previous post.

BTW, there will be an authors & editors book signing at GDC (probably Wednesday 6 PM, maybe earlier) and GTC (almost assuredly Thursday 3 PM), assuming the hardcover book publishing process goes properly and on time. By me adding the phrase “assuming the hardcover book…” I’m hoping to nullify any jinx that occurred by me mentioning these signings – we’re on a tight publication schedule, to put it mildly. I’ll also be giving a “Fast Forward” talk, e.g., on the book’s contents, the hour just before each of these two signings. I promise there will be no rap (Ken Perlin did great in 2002, can’t top that, though all too many have tried), but I may use haikus, such as for Chapter 7:

With a trembling arm
shoot an arrow at a coin –
so are ray and sphere.

That makes you want to read that article I coauthored, right? Right?!

Thousands of person-hours went into this book and there’s lots of great content, so, enjoy! Oh, and spread the word with their tweet or mine.