1. Overview

Ray Tracing: The Next Week (v3.2.3): 1 Overview / 2.1 Overview

Ray Tracing: The Next Week is an introductory book on ray tracing written by Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch. The latest version at the time of writing is Version 4.0.2 (2025-04-25).

The Japanese translation by inzkyk was published on 2020-06-06. The closest English release is Version 3.1.2 (2020-06-04). The chapter structures of the v3 and v4 English editions differ in some respects. The English links at the top of each section in this book therefore point to Version 3.2.3 (2020-12-08), the final release in the v3 series, while the Japanese links point to inzkyk's translation. Because the v3 English book could not be found on the official website, a copy of the v3.2.3 tagged release has been mirrored on this site.

I thank the original authors Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch, as well as inzkyk for publishing the Japanese translation.

The Next Week is a sequel to Ray Tracing in One Weekend that builds on the ray tracer developed in the first book. Whereas the first book presents a weekend project for learning the fundamentals of ray tracing, TNW can be regarded as a project for the following weekend that introduces more advanced features. It carries the existing codebase forward while expanding its textures and materials, introducing acceleration of intersection tests through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), and presenting other techniques for rendering more complex scenes efficiently. These additions also make the WebAssembly examples slower to display than those in In One Weekend. Please allow them time to finish rendering.