dotfiles VS pbrt-v3

Felt (still am, actually) this problem too. Started with the same approach (Vanilla Emacs) a few years back in order to really learn the ins-and-outs after giving DOOM and others a shot and feeling like I didn't have the faintest what was really going on with all the magic. I somehow did end up falling in love with Emacs again[^1].

Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].

Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found dustinlyons/nixos-config (https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module...) just a few days ago and figured that could be a fun resource when you're building yours up.

Take it as a hobby. There are a bunch of nice things that I picked up from Emacs (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my editor works which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but I still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through live and build dope stuff, unencumbered.

1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.

2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.

Word! I believe I'm in the literate config stage atm https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/blob/main/emacs/README.org but still have a fair amount of stuff in the WIP state or COMMENT-ed out because I broke stuff somehow. Which reminds me a bit of picture 1. 🙊🙈

TL;DR: I recently started refactoring up my home-manager nix config https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/reorg-for-lit-prog and my Emacs config https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/reorg-for-lit-prog/emacs into literate programs to aid my future self's understanding of whatever I'm cooking up so, feel free to sneek a peek how they end up looking. I also keep the output code in the same repo.

Physically Based Rendering[0] was an excellent textbook when I read it ages ago and conveniently enough it looks to have been updated with a new edition last year.

[0]: https://pbrt.org/

Physically Based Raytracing

Both of these books are free, and both are written in C++, but they can be done in any language. The first book, a raytracer in a weekend, is part of a series, you can find it here: https://raytracing.github.io/ And, if you get to the third book in that series, or you need a reference book, the PBRT book covers the math in more depth and discusses the latest theory, you can get the last edition of the book (5 years out of date) for free though: https://pbrt.org/

Making a “complete” one is a never-ending rabbit hole you can spend a lifetime on and is a very active area of research covering more advanced geometry, probability, optics, machine learning etc etc. A great introduction to that is https://pbrt.org

This isn't the highest priority but if you haven't already, learn how computer graphics works. Get a working knowledge of the camera matrix, real time graphics (say, OpenGL but threeJS is an option), and photorealistic graphics. PBRT is the go-to for photorealistic graphics. The first two books of Foundations of Game Engine Development are way more useful than they have any right to be (and my favorite textbooks I've ever read, 10/10).

Org-mode strength though is in working with different languages in a same source file, which I am not sure if Knuths version does. Anyway, to see how the original idea looks like, check the Wikipedia article, or to see it in real-life see some of books that are written in the literate style, like Physically Based Rendering, which seems to be available for free nowadays or C Interfaces and Implementations.

I contributed a tiny bit to pbrt[1], and one of the things I loved was that if you just plugged in physical values you almost always got great results with minimal tweaking.

The Octane data seems most complete at first glance (with complex IOR etc), but for things like milk and blood I expected at the very least some absorption coefficient for the translucency or similar.

[1]: https://pbrt.org/