Chapter Six Camera Models

In Chapter 1, we described the pinhole camera model that is commonly used in computer graphics. This model is easy to describe and simulate, but it has a number of drawbacks. For example, everything rendered with a pinhole camera is in sharp focus, which can make images look computer generated. In order to make images that appear realistic, it is important to better simulate properties of real-world imaging systems.

Like the Shapes from Chapter 3, cameras in pbrt are represented by an abstract base class. This chapter describes the Camera class and its two closely related methods: Camera::GenerateRay() and Camera::GenerateRayDifferential(). The first method computes the world space ray corresponding to a sample position ...

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