Customer Reviews

Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook: Further Recreations in Computer Graphics

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Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook: Further Recreations in Computer Graphics by computer graphics researcher and expert Andrew Glassner is an inspiring, thought-provoking, full-color, visual, mathematical, and tutorial tour of some of the artistic achievements that modern computers are capable of. Individual chapters address programming functions and commands to craft remarkable images of soap bubbles, Celtic knotwork, recreate special lighting and camera techniques, transform sounds into shapes, and much more. Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook is a very highly recommended supplementary resource for budding computer artists, hobbyists, students, and professional designers seeking to create unique and memorable computer graphics.

The combination of beautiful graphics and a curious mind make this book a fantastic educational experience. I just happened to see it in a bookstore, picked it up, and couldn't stop reading it until the end. The quality of the book, even though it is a paperback, is fantastic, and each chapter opens up a new and fun idea. I notice that Amazon is nearly out of stock. I suspect that means it's really selling well. It should.

This collection of articles by Andrew Glassner is great for sparking the imagination of computer graphics programmers by getting them to look at problems in unconventional ways. Glassner tackles a number of interesting subjects in this second effort of his "Notebook" series.
My personal favorite was the section on soap bubbles, because it gave me some interesting ideas for creating some animations. Glassner discusses the chemistry of soap films, some of their basic geometry, and how to write a soap-film shader. He also talks about wave interference, and how that gives rise to the beautiful colors that make up soap bubbles.
Another useful article for animators was the one on the ceraunoscope that could produce lightning with particular physical and audio characteristics. One of the most ingenious articles was the Shape Synthesizer, which is a system for artistic 3D modeling. Rather than computerize an existing 3D medium, Glassner developed a technique for creating shapes. He turned to the highly successful field of sound synthesis, and derived three principles that were important to sound synthesizers and also map well into 3D geometry. He used this mapping to develop a set of modules and a single data type carried by the "wires" between modules resulting in interesting 3D forms.
There are also chapters relating - of all things - window wipers and computer graphics, and there is an entire article devoted to quantum computing. If you have any interest in this field you might want to start with this book, since Glassner does a better job of explaining the basics of quantum computing in his one article than do most books on the subject.
Although there is no code included with this book, there are enough details given both via text and equations that you should be able to write your own. Therefore, I would highly recommend this book both to the computer graphic programmer as well as anyone else with a curious and probing mind.