Customer Reviews

Computer Graphics Using OpenGL (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you want a book that is not targeted towards a specific platform, just one that contains the guts of the algorithms necessary for creating curves, ray tracing, affine transformations, and the all-too-necesary World-to-Viewport code, this one is well worth the money. Definitely for the reader with a strong background in programming and mathematics, but not too much for a no-brainer like myself (I passed Calc2 with a 'D')!

This is an excellent first book on Computer graphics using OpenGL - very accessible and enjoyable at the same time, with a good breadth of coverage as well.

I took a course under Prof. Hill while he was a visiting Prof. at the Indian Institue of Science, which used the draft of this book. We had a great time learning graphics with Prof. Hill - his enthusiasm is infectious, and this comes out in the textbook as well. We were able to develop a 'Tour of the Tajmahal' by the end of the course, with lots of special effects (like texturing, flying objects) - it was **beautiful** :-) !!

The book covers all the usual material expected in a Computer graphics textbook - transformations, modeling, texturing, hidden surface removal ........, as well as somewhat 'advanced' topics like ray-tracing.

The writing style is engaging and the explanations are very clear - this is a book that makes it easy to learn graphics. It also contains helpful tutorial material for all the maths background required, and a really huge number of exercises - obviously, you need not do all of them, just take your pick.

Please note that it is **not** a tutorial/reference on OpenGL - it merely uses OpenGL as the tool of choice for writing graphics code. If you want to learn OpenGL, please check out the 'Official guide to learning OpenGL' by Woo et al - we used that text in conjunction with this in our course, and it's really helpful for getting upto speed with OpenGL.

All in all, this is an excellent choice if you want an uptodate text on Computer graphics using OpenGL.

This is a good solid introductory text on computer graphics theory and programming. Note that the book uses OpenGL rather than teaching it, so if you are looking for an OpenGL tutorial you will be disappointed. For that consult the classic "Red Book" on the subject. This book does throw in a couple of advanced topics - fractals, virtual realism, and ray tracing, for example. I really liked how the explanations were very detailed, and how pseudocode accompanies the explanation of every algorithm. The pseudocode is C-like and is therefore easily understandable. Also, the author makes excellent and frequent use of very excellent figures to get his points across. I also liked all of the practice problems, because they are good sanity checks on whether or not you really understand the material.

I will add that I was at first hesitant to add this book to my collection, because in the early 90's I used a textbook by this same author in a class I was taking on computer graphics, and it was about the most awful thing I have ever seen in print. There were a couple of good chapters, but most of it was paragraph after paragraph of rambling text without equations, codes, or anything that approached a tutorial. I wasn't a novice to this subject at the time, either, so it wasn't a lack of knowledge on the subject that made me hate that book. I'm saying all of this just in case this was your last experience with this author, don't let it prevent you from getting this book. Hill seems to have learned from his past mistakes, and I highly recommend this text. I notice the table of contents shown is for an older edition. This edition has changed considerably, so I show the new table of contents for the 3rd edition next:

Chapter 1 Introduction to Computer Graphics
1.1 What is Computer Graphics?
1.2 Where Computer Generated pictures are Used
1.3 Elements of Pictures created in Computer Graphics.
1.4 Graphics display devices
1.5 Graphics Input Primitives and Devices

Chapter 2 Getting Started Drawing Figures
2.1 Getting started making pictures
2.2 Drawing Basic Graphics Primitives
2.3 Making Line-drawings
2.4 Simple interaction with mouse and keyboard

Chapter 3 Additional Drawing Tools
3.1. Introduction
3.2. World Windows and Viewports
3.3. Clipping Lines
3.4. Regular Polygons, Circles, and Arcs
3.5. The Parametric Form of a Curve.

Chapter 4 Vector Tools for Graphics
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Review of Vectors
4.3. The Dot Product.
4.4. The Cross Product of Two Vectors.
4.5. Representations of Key Geometric Objects.
4.6. Finding the Intersection of two Line Segments.
4.7. Intersections of Lines with Planes, and Clipping.
4.8. Polygon Intersection Problems.

Chapter 5 Transformations of Objects
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Introduction to Transformations
5.3. 3D Affine Transformations
5.4. How To Change Coordinate Systems
5.5. Affine Transformations used in a Program.
5.6. To Draw 3D Scenes Interactively with OpenGL.

Chapter 6 Modeling Shapes with Polygonal Meshes.
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Introduction to Solid Modeling with Polygonal Meshes.
6.3. Polyhedra.
6.4. Extruded Shapes.
6.5. Mesh Approximations to Smooth Objects.
6.6. Particle Systems and Physically Based Systems

Chapter 7 Three-Dimensional Viewing
7.1 Introduction
7.2. The Camera Revisited.
7.3. To Specify a Camera in a program.
7.4. Perspective Projections of 3D Objects.
7.5. To Produce Stereo Views.
7.6. Taxonomy of Projections.

Chapter 8 Rendering Faces for Visual Realism
8.1. Introduction
8.2. Introduction to Shading Models
8.3. Flat Shading and Smooth Shading.
8.4. Adding Hidden Surface Removal.
8.5. To Add Texture to Faces.
8.6. To Add Shadows of Objects.
8.7. OpenGL 2.0 & The Shading Language (GLSL)

Chapter 9 Tools for Raster Displays
9.1. Introduction
9.2. Manipulating Pixmaps.
9.3. Combining Pixmaps.
9.4. Do It Yourself Line Drawing: Bresenham's Algorithm.
9.5 To Define and Fill Regions of Pixels.
9.6. Manipulating Symbolically-defined Regions.
9.7. Filling Polygon-Defined Regions.
9.8. Aliasing and Anti-Aliasing Techniques.
9.9. Creating More Shades and Colors.

Chapter 10 Curve and Surface Design
10.1. Introduction
10.2. Describing Curves using Polynomials.
10.3. On Interactive Curve Design.
10.4. Bezier Curves for Curve Design.
10.5. Properties of Bezier Curves.
10.6. Finding Better Blending functions.
10.7. The B-Spline Basis Functions.
10.8. Useful Properties of B-Spline Curves for Design.
10.9. Rational Splines and NURBS Curves.
10.10. A Glimpse at Interpolation.
10.11. Modeling Curved Surfaces.

Chapter 11 Color Theory
11.1. Introduction
11.2. Color Description
11.3. The CIE Standard
11.4. Color Spaces
11.5. Indexed Color and the LUT.
11.6. Color Quantization.

Chapter 12 Ray Tracing
12.1. Introduction
12.2. Setting Up the Geometry of Ray Tracing
12.3. Overview of the Ray-Tracing Process
12.4. Intersection of a Ray with an Object.
12.5. Organizing a Ray Tracer Application.
12.6. Intersecting Rays with Other Primitives
12.7. To Draw Shaded Pictures of Scenes
12.8. Adding Surface Texture.
12.9. Anti-aliasing Ray Tracings.
12.10. Using Extents
12.11. Adding Shadows for Greater Realism.
12.12. Reflections and Transparency
12.13. Compound Objects: Boolean Operations on Objects
12.14. Ray Tracing vs. Ray Casting

A1. Graphics Tools - Obtaining OpenGL.

A2. Some Mathematics for Computer Graphics
A2.1 Some Key Definitions for Matrices and their Operations
A2.2. Some Properties of Vectors and their operations.
A2.3. Spherical Coordinates and Direction Cosines.

A3. An Introduction to SDL: Scene Description Language
A3.1. Syntax of SDL
A3.2. Macros in SDL.
A3.3. Extending SDL.

A4. Fractals and The Mandelbrot Set
A4.1. Introduction
A4.2. Fractals and Self-Similarity
A4.3. The Mandelbrot Set

A5. Relative and Turtle Drawing.
A5.1. To Develop moveRel() and lineRel().
A5.2. Turtle Graphics
A5.3. Figures Based on Regular Polygons.

You'll note that the main difference between the second and third editions is that Hidden Surface Removal and Fractals no longer have dedicated chapters, but additional chapters on other subjects have not been added. The HSR material is now part of another chapter, and the Fractal subject matter is part of the appendix. One positive difference is the addition of some good material on the OpenGL Shading Language, which is a hot topic these days. Also, the material in the appendix on Postscript has been eliminated.

The title of the book is misleading; It is rather an introduction to computer graphics;
The explanations on the graphics pipeline are really enlightening; The introduction on the curves is also worth reading. I consider it to be also a good introduction to OpenGL.
However, it deserves only 3 stars because of the too many typo errors (and that's the third edition...). Moreover some topics are too superficially treated, particularly extents or bounding volumes (which are of great importance in computer graphics), and surfaces.
The book is verbose, which is acceptable when some notions are hard to grasp, but it is definitely too verbose at the start of each chapters where you will find a "preview" followed by an "Introduction" section. One repeats the other.
In addition, the appendices only contribute to the thickness of the book. An appendix on matrix algebra where you will learn how to add / multiply matrices (...) and an appendix on the turtle drawing, a hot thing in the early 80s...
There is no real bibliography section, and no errata on the author's web site.
I was also not pleased by the exercises; the ones that are trivial are fully developed by the author, and the solution to the thornier ones are not presented.

I just bought this book and up to chapter 3 there are more errors and typos than what I care to recall. You would expect more of a book with a price tag as this one. Furthermore, the writing style is bad. The author begins a paragraph with one idea and finishes with something totally different, which makes it hard to read.

It is a very good book otherwise, but keep this in mind when buying.

The third edition is a mess. Get the second edition which is 5-star and one of the great classics of computer graphics.
Computer Graphics Using Open GL (2nd Edition)

I managed to get a ray tracing program up and running using the algorithms in the book...and even understand what was going on. Quite an excellent book with regards to the fundamentals of computer graphics and the mathematics involved.

I recomend it thoroughly.

Rating: 4/5

It could do with a new version, 1990 is a while ago now I guess, though the basics (read maths)stay the same.