The last few years have seen a decisive move in the film industry toward physically based rendering methods, mostly with path tracing. Increasing demands for realism in lighting, rendering, and material modeling, plus a working paradigm that very naturally models the behavior of light in the real world, mean that every year more and more movies are created with physically based rendering. This shift was also recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when it presented three 2016 SciTech awards to ray-tracing renderers for their crucial contributions to film production.

While the language and toolkit available to technical directors are moving closer to natural language, an understanding of the techniques and algorithms behind the workings of physically based renderers are still of fundamental importance for efficient use of the available resources, especially because techniques from the previous world of rasterization-based rendering can introduce confusion and cause costly mistakes. This course surveys the architectures and novel possibilities of the next generation of production renderers.