rrizzo@bbn.com (Ron Rizzo) (08/17/89)
I'm new to computer graphics & comp.graphics. I'd appreciate any bibliographical pointers people could give me to books about graphics and/or animation. I'm almost finished reading Hearn & Baker's textbook COMPUTER GRAPHICS. I picked it for the pretty color pictures, figuring a poorly illustrated computer graphics text is something to avoid. Hearn & Baker is a good first pass, but I find I want more depth. So I've started reading the optics chapters in volume 1 of Feynman's Lectures. Feynman says the basic principles of geometrical optics are simple & have been understood for centuries, and that computers have made the laborious but obviously ideal method of ray tracing feasible at least. He's not interested in engineering. So what I really need is a kind of engineering text on the physics & optics of illumination. A local bookstore sells a 1989 volume by Roy Hall for $49.50 that looks fascinating (Springer Verlag publisher). It not only gives a lot of code, but the underlying mathematics & physics behind ray-tracing and other methods (Phong, Goureaud, etc.) that realistically render complex lighting & shading effects. But the price tag is too high and I doubt most libraries have a copy yet. Any recommendations? I find myself being drawn to the following topics: shading & coloring models & techniques; ray-tracing; perspective projections. I'd also be interested in any recommendations people can make about books on computer animation and computer art (stills). I know that ideally I should beg, steal or borrow access to a good & powerful graphics system and play with it as much as I can. Barring that, am I condemned to plough throw lengthy equation-scrawled papers in the SIGGRAPH proceedings volumes? How do find your way through THAT forest? BTW, has anyone posted summary descriptions of SIGGRAPH '89 events (eg, the animation extravanganza) to this newsgroup or comp.graphics.digest? Finally, for eastern Massachusetts netters, can you recommend any computer graphics courses to take? The 2-semester sequence at Harvard Extension sounds interesting. Regards, Ron
markv@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mark T Vandewettering) (08/17/89)
In article <44401@bbn.COM> rrizzo@BBN.COM (Ron Rizzo) writes: >I'm new to computer graphics & comp.graphics. I'd appreciate any >bibliographical pointers people could give me to books about graphics >and/or animation. >I find myself being drawn to the following topics: shading & coloring >models & techniques; ray-tracing; perspective projections. >Any recommendations? Roy Hall's book on illumination and color should be a must read for anyone with a serious interest in computer graphics, although you should read the copyright restrictions in the front before you make any commercial use of the software contained within. Basic texts in computer graphics are Rogers, "Procedural Elements of Computer Graphics", and Foley and VanDam, which is soon to be released in a new revised edition, so hold off on that one. Rogers is pretty good, a tad dated perhaps, although it has a brief section on raytracing. For ray tracing, try "An Introduction to Ray Tracing", edited by Andrew Glassner, by Academic Press 1989. This is the set of course notes from Siggraph's Ray Tracing Tutorial, and is what I learned most of what I know about ray tracing from. (That, and innumerable Siggraph articles). This is a real MUST buy. You can also look at the ray tracing archives that I maintain on cs.uoregon.edu, login as "ftp", with any password, and snoop about. Mark VandeWettering