Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

Every time I see stuff like this it makes me think about optical design software.

There are applications (Zemax, for example) that are used to design optical systems (lens arrangements for cameras, etc). These applications are eye-wateringly expensive-- like similar in pricing to top-class EDA software licenses.

With the abundance GPU's and modern UI's, I wonder how much work would be involved for someone to make optical design software that blows away the old tools. It would be ray-tracing, but with interesting complications like accounting for polarization, diffraction, scattering, fluorescence, media effects beyond refraction like like birefringence and stuff like Kerr and Pockels, etc.

This, very much this!

I do research in a subfield of optics called nonimaging optics (optics for energy transfer, e.g. solar concentrators or lighting systems). We typically use these optical design applications, and your observations are absolutely correct. Make some optical design software that uses GPUs for raytracing, reverse-mode autodiff for optimization, sprinkle in some other modern techniques you may blow these older tools out of the water.

I am hoping to be able to get some projects going in this direction (feel free to reach out if anyone are interested).

PS: I help organize an academic conference my subfield of optics. We run a design competition this year [1,2]. Would be super cool if someone submits a design that they made by drawing inspiration from modern computer graphics tools (maybe using Mitsuba 3, by one of the authors of this book?), instead of using our classical applications in the field.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609892

[2] https://nonimaging-conference.org/competition-2025/upload/

Sounds a bit like https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/mitsuba2

Yes, exactly. I have not looked at Mitsuba 2, but Mitsuba 3 is absolutely along these lines. It is just starting to be picked up by some of the nonimaging/illumination community, e.g. there was a paper last year from Aurele Adam's group at TU Delft where they used it for optimizing a "magic window" [1]. Some tradeoffs and constraints are a bit different when doing optical design versus doing (inverse) rendering, but it definitely shows what is possible.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.515422