1. Overview

Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life (v3.2.3): 1 Overview / 3.1 Overview

Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life is an introductory ray-tracing book written by Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch. The latest edition at the time of writing is Version 4.0.2, released on April 25, 2025.

inzkyk published a Japanese translation on June 6, 2020; the nearest English release was Version 3.1.2 from June 4, 2020. The chapter structures differ in places between the English v3 and v4 series. The English links at the top of each section in this guide therefore point to Version 3.2.3 (December 8, 2020), the final v3 release. The Japanese links point to inzkyk's translation. Because the official site did not appear to retain the v3 English book, this site hosts a copy of the files tagged v3.2.3 in the Git repository.

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

The Rest of Your Life follows Ray Tracing in One Weekend and The Next Week, taking readers who have learned the foundations of ray tracing into greater depth. Book 3 focuses on Monte Carlo methods in ray tracing and systematically develops models of light scattering and sampling techniques. As with The Next Week, rendering through WebAssembly takes time. Please be patient.