5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is PURE gold, December 17, 2001
This review is from: Jim Blinn's Corner: Dirty Pixels (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) (Paperback)
This is an absolutely wonderful book. Readable, yet technical; quite funny in places, yet to the point; insightful, but no incomprehensible "head in the clouds" academic rambling (he rambles a bit, entertainingly and technically, but he explains everything so it's a pleasant experience instead of the deadly difficult reading some of the common graphics texts provide.)
There are also some biographical interludes that aren't graphics, strictly speaking, but I found them eminently worth reading. Even if you don't, though, they only represent a very small fraction of the book and you can discount or skip them entirely without loss of technical detail, as they are in their own little isolated portions of the text.
The book itself is a series of separate (but often related) ruminations on various subjects of a graphic nature; the only problem the book has is that it ended way too soon for me.
I was entertained, enlightened, and I went *straight* to our source code and improved a number of things within hours of understanding what Blinn was telling me in more than one place. With immediate and MOST satisfying results, I can add.
:-)
The only problem this book can possibly said to have is that there are many areas of graphics, an admittedly very wide field, that Blinn says nothing about - and after seeing what he has to say on what he *does* talk about, one can only be left with a sense of loss that he doesn't (for example) write about textures here, or perhaps pick apart a few more taken for granted areas, which he does several times in this volume to great effect.
If you write graphics code, you should own this. Buy it now. NOW!
What are you doing still reading? BUY IT NOW!
No, I don't know the guy, and I get no commission or other compensation.
:-)
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good second book in Blinn's "Corner" series, March 11, 2006
This review is from: Jim Blinn's Corner: Dirty Pixels (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) (Paperback)
This is the second book in Jim Blinn's "Corner" series, and it has some good information in it, but I didn't think it was quite up to par with his first book. There are 3 articles on digital video issues that are essentially no longer relevant. Plus, the author has a couple of articles that basically act as memoirs of technical events in the distant past so that due to changes in technology, they are also of limited usefulness.
Like the first book, it is not intended to be a computer graphics textbook. It is simply a set of articles that the author has written over the years, mainly from the late 80's to the mid 90's, on computer graphics topics. The author offers up mathematics as it is needed and pseudocode. I review the book by individual article:
Chapter 1 The World's Largest Easter Egg and What Came Out of It
The use of an interesting triangulation scheme to design a monumental sculpture of an easter egg is described. The triangulation method used to approximate the egg's surface is based on paper folding. The development of the program and its generalization to three dimensions are examined. The calculation of the three parts of the egg (a middle-barrel section and the two end caps) and some unsolved questions regarding this technique are discussed.
Chapter 2 What We Need Around Here Is More Aliasing
A brief tutorial is given on what aliasing means. Plots of some relevant functions are shown. Some of the conventional wisdom about aliasing and why that wisdom may not be so wise is explained. Aliasing is actually an image processing phenomenon involving the Fourier transform, convolution and the convolution theorem.
Chapter 3 Return of the Jaggy
The antialiasing problem of filtering out high frequencies before sampling is considered. The techniques examined are simple filters, box filters, the triangle or tent filter, Gaussian and similarly shaped filters, and the ideal filter. The use of subsampling and the effect of D/A converters are discussed.
Chapter 4 How Many Different Curves Are There?
A categorizaion of the types of shapes a homogeneous cubic can generate.
Chapter 5 Dirty Pixels
How to optimally encode intensity into an 8 bit pixel.
Chapter 6 Cubic Curve Update
The problem of cataloging all the shapes that can be generated by a cubic equation. In response to a letter commenting on an earlier column, he corrects an error in his listing of all the combinations of factorizations that could make degenerate curves, pointing out that all type 5's are really the same shape and all type 7's are really the same shape. He provides additional considerations on the possible shapes of nondegenerate curves.
Chapter 7 Triage Tables
The author considers the application of the principle of triage to computer graphics to speed up certain types of algorithms. He describes a very simple data structure that he has used to keep track of triage information in several situations. He applies his method to Warnock's algorithm and to a hidden-line-elimination problem.
Chapter 8 The Wonderful World of Video
An overview of video animation for computer graphics is given. Signal timing, color encoding, tape formats, tracking, genlocking, time code, editing, VTR communication, and software are covered. This article is somewhat outdated.
Chapter 9 Uppers and Downers
Notational schemes for vectors and matrices are addressed. Previous notation is reviewed and its deficiencies exposed. A new notation, borrowed from tensor analysis, is introduced. Using this notation, almost all of geometry is reduced to tensor multiplication.
Chapter 10 Uppers and Downers, Part II
The Feynman diagrams, which represent the product of tensors in diagram form as directed graphs, are described. In the diagrams, each tensor in the product is a node in the graph, each index is an arc, bound indices are arcs connecting the nodes, and free indices are dangling arcs. The epsilon-delta rule in diagram rotation is presented.
Chapter 11 The World of Digital Video
Digital video standards define byte-stream signal formats for transferring video over cables. The composite and component standards, two digital video standards that relate most closely to the NTSC broadcast standard, are discussed. The analog NTSC signal and the framework of digital video standards are reviewed. The horizontal timing, quantization, and TRS-ID used by the composite digital standard, and the vertical renaming, scan line timing, and pixel value quantizing used by the component digital standard are described. This is another article that is somewhat dated.
Chapter 12 How I Spent My Summer Vacation 1976
Reminiscences on Blinn's summer at NYIT in 1976. This is more of a humorous personal musing than it is instructive.
Chapter 13 NTSC: Nice Technology, Super Color
Lots of articles talk about the YIQ to RGB transform. Blinn shows how to simulate an image's appearance on a NTSC monitor using digital filtering techniques. Another dated article.
Chapter 14 What's the Deal with the DCT?
Talks about the discrete cosine transform and why it is superior to other transformation methods for image compression.
Chapter 15 Quantization Error and Dithering
Whenever you do any sort of image arithmetic, such as contrast enhancement or compositing, you get roundoff error. In fact, since the arithmetic is often done in only X-bit accuracy, sometimes the round-off error can be substantial. You get quantization error, on the other hand, whenever you go from an analog signal to a digital signal or whenever you go from a high color-resolution signal to a low resolution signal, say from 24 to 8 bits per pixel. The author considers both of these problems.
Chapter 16 Compositing Theory
Associating a pixel's color with its opacity is the basis for a compositing function that is simple, elegant, and general. However, there are more reasons than mere prettiness to store pixels this way. One of the most important anti-aliasing tools in computer graphics comes from a generalization of the simple act of storing a pixel into a frame buffer. It was most completely codified in a previous paper by Porter and Duff (1984), where they call it the over operator. The author shows a new way to derive the over operator and describes some implementation details that he has found useful.
Chapter 17 Compositing - Practice
The author discusses the practice of image compositing and in particular the Porter-Duff "over" operator. The author has found it most useful to provide "over" as an inplace operator; you have an image stored in a frame buffer and want to lay another image on top of it. Pixel representation, conversions, pixel arithmetic, 16-bit over 8-bit, 8-bit over 8-bit, and other 8-bit possibilities are discussed.
Chapter 18 How to Attend a SIGGRAPH Conference
Blinn is one of the few people who has been to the first 22 of the Siggraph annual conferences. In this article, he gives some historical nuggets and tips he has formulated over the years. He discusses time management, technical talks, panels, equipment shows, video shows, art shows, parties, name badges and the summer camp session. Due to the changes in presentation technology, this article looks old in places too.
Chapter 19 Three Wrongs Make a Right
When dealing with graphics operations that must be fast (like the inner loops of rendering algorithms), Blinn usually likes to do calculations with fixed-point arithmetic. The motivation for this discussion is the desire to do arithmetic on pixel values: red, green, blue, or alpha. He uses floating point as a testbed and as scaffolding to derive integer formulas. All final calculations take place using only integer arithmetic.
Chapter 20 Fun with Premultiplied Alpha
The computer graphics universe consists of pixels. Pixels, in turn, consist of components: red, green, blue, and the coverage or opacity value alpha. For various reasons it is convenient to store and process a given rgba quadruple with the rgb values already multiplied by a. This premultiplication has some other interesting implications which are discussed here.
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