The world of photorealistic three-dimensional images and surreal surroundings is opened up in this book. It teaches how to simulate lighting, surface texture, transparency, reflection, and refraction.

Chapter 1, “Ray Tracing Primer,” quickly reviews the historical background and brings the reader quickly up to speed to explain the ray tracing method. Shadow, reflected, and transmitted (that is, through transparent or partially transparent objects) rays are illustrated well.

Chapter 2, on “Using POV-Ray” (POV-Ray is the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer), describes a bundled software package that allows the user to create striking visual images. Various highlights using reflections from a shiny surface are provided using a variant of a method originally due to B.T. Phong in 1973. The first sample scene consists of a camera, a sphere, a plane, and a light source. The scene description language enables one to quickly understand the visual images without programming experience because over 100 scenes are already stored on the supplied disk and 50 standard materials are also available. The program will run several times faster with a math coprocessor but does not require one.

Chapter 3, “Basic Shapes,” explains in more detail how spheres, planes, boxes, cylinders, cones, and ellipsoids are precisely described. The transformation processes of translate, scale, and rotate are illustrated well.

Chapter 4, “Basic Textures,” explains how to add color, substance, and life to the forms you create. Through textured descriptions you can alter the surface appearance, color patterns, shine, reflection, and transparency. Checkered patterns admit many blocks of colors. A turbulence effect is quite powerful. With color maps you can create marble, bozo (the authors’ name for blotchy, random colors for clouds), and agate. Bumps, ripples, dents, and wrinkles are also possible.

Chapter 5, on “Advanced Shape and Textures,” deals with compound shapes where one can add or subtract several basic shapes to or from a given form. The intersection between a sphere and a carved box is striking. Bicubic or Bézier patches provide a three-dimensional curved mesh of triangles defined by 16 control points. Additional quartics are fourth-order surfaces where one can define a torus (donut), lemniscate (ribbon), and piriform (the shape of a Hershey’s chocolate kiss).

Chapter 7, “Reference,” provides a complete overview of how the POV-Ray program operates, and the details of the command-line switches. Additional details on the scene description language, with its syntax and keywords, are illustrated with black-and-white photos.

The text reads well. I was disappointed that several of the black-and-white photos were underexposed. I hope that the next edition will correct this. The color photos are excellent. This text should find a wide and welcoming audience among those lacking artistic and programming skills.