siggraph course: path tracing in production 2017
this is the web page for the 2017 siggraph course and will be featuring the course notes and talk slides once finalised! watch this space :)
[updated 2018-07-23: added sony's slides]
abstract:

The last few years have seen a decisive move of the movie making industry towards rendering using physically-based methods, mostly implemented in terms of path tracing. Increasing demands on the realism of lighting, rendering and material modeling, paired with a working paradigm that very naturally models the behaviour of light like in the real world mean that more and more movies each year are created the physically-based way. This shift has also been recently recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which in this year's SciTech ceremony has awarded three ray tracing renderers for their crucial contribution to this move. While the language and toolkit available to the technical directors get closer and closer to natural language, an understanding of the techniques and algorithms behind the workings of the renderer of choice are still of fundamental importance to make efficient use of the available resources, especially when the hard-learned lessons and tricks from the previous world of rasterization-based rendering can introduce confusion and cause costly mistakes. In this course, the architectures and novel possibilities of the next generation of production renderers are introduced to a wide audience including technical directors, artists, and researchers.
course notes (updated 2018-07-23, note that these are more recent than the version in the ACM repository): part 1, part 2
presenters: 
@inproceedings{fascione2017ptp1,
 author = {Fascione, Luca and Hanika, Johannes and
    Fajardo, Marcos and Christensen, Per
    and Burley, Brent and
    Green, Brian},
 title = {Path Tracing in Production -
    Part 1: Production Renderers},
 booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses},
 series = {SIGGRAPH '17},
 year = {2017},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-5014-3},
 location = {Los Angeles, California},
 pages = {13:1--13:39},
 articleno = {13},
 numpages = {39},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3084873.3084904},
 doi = {10.1145/3084873.3084904},
} 

@inproceedings{fascione2017ptp2,
 author = {Fascione, Luca and Hanika, Johannes and
    Piek{\'e}, Rob and Hery, Christophe and
    Villemin, Ryusuke and Schmidt, Thorsten-Walther and
    Kulla, Christopher and Heckenberg, Daniel
    and Mazzone, Andr{\'e}},
 title = {Path Tracing in Production -
    Part 2: Making Movies},
 booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses},
 series = {SIGGRAPH '17},
 year = {2017},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-5014-3},
 location = {Los Angeles, California},
 pages = {15:1--15:32},
 articleno = {15},
 numpages = {32},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3084873.3084906},
 doi = {10.1145/3084873.3084906},
}