Today truly useful and interactive graphics are available on affordable computers. While hardware progress has been impressive, widespread gains in software expertise have come more slowly. Information about advanced techniques―beyond those learned in introductory computer graphics texts―is not as easy to come by as inexpensive hardware. This book brings the graphics programmer beyond the basics and introduces them to advanced knowledge that is hard to obtain outside of an intensive CG work environment. The book is about graphics techniques―those that don’t require esoteric hardware or custom graphics libraries―that are written in a comprehensive style and do useful things. It covers graphics that are not covered well in your old graphics textbook. But it also goes further, teaching you how to apply those techniques in real world applications, filling real world needs.
- Emphasizes the algorithmic side of computer graphics, with a practical application focus, and provides usable techniques for real world problems.
- Serves as an introduction to the techniques that are hard to obtain outside of an intensive computer graphics work environment.
- Sophisticated and novel programming techniques are implemented in C using the OpenGL library, including coverage of color and lighting; texture mapping; blending and compositing; antialiasing; image processing; special effects; natural phenomena; artistic and non-photorealistic techniques, and many others.
Tom McReynolds has worked on 3D graphics at Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Gigapixel, 3DFX, and NVIDIA. He has worked in software organizations, writing graphics libraries and drivers, and on the hardware side, writing simulators and verification software for 3D hardware. He presented 3D graphics courses at a number of SIGGRAPH conferences, as well as at a number of Silicon Graphics Developer conferences, an X technical conference, and at LinuxWorld. Tom is currently managing a development team to 3D graphics drivers for embedded GPUs at NVIDIA, and contributing to the evolution of OpenGL-ES by participating in the Khronos working group.
David Blythe has worked in the 3D graphics field professionally for the last 14 years, including serving as Chief Engineer at Silicon Graphics, a representative on the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, editor for the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification, and a frequent SIGGRAPH course presenter. While at Silicon Graphics, David contributed to the development of the RealityEngine and InfiniteReality graphics systems. He has worked extensively on implementations of the OpenGL graphics library, OpenGL extension specifications, and high-level toolkits built on top of OpenGL. David’s other industry experience includes embedded and system-on-a-chip design, mobile devices, and wireless networking. David is currently a graphics architect in the Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies division at Microsoft working on DirectX and OpenGL graphics technologies.
