Real-Time Rendering, Second Edition 2nd Edition

Eric Haines, a graduate of the Cornell program of Computer Graphics, is currently a lead software engineer at Autodesk, Inc. Haines, a member of the editorial board for the journal of graphics tools, has also published a number of articles, some of which are included in the Graphics Gems series

From Chapter 1: What follows is a brief overview of the chapters ahead.

Chapter 2: The Graphics Rendering Pipeline. This chapter deals with the heart of real-time rendering, the mechanism that takes a scene description and converts it into something we can see.

Chapter 3: Transforms. Transforms are the basic tools for manipulating the position, orientation, size, and shape of objects and the location and view of the camera.

Chapter 4: Visual appearance. This chapter covers the definition of materials and lights and their use in achieving a realistic surface appearance. Also covered are other appearance-related topics, such as providing higher image quality through antialiasing and gamma correction.

Chapter 5: Texturing. One of the most powerful hardware-accelerated tools for real-time rendering is the ability to display data such as images on surfaces. This chapter discusses the mechanics of this technique, called texturing, and presents a wide variety of methods for applying it.

Chapter 6: Advanced Lighting and Shading. This chapter discusses the theory and practice of correctly represented materials. One focus in on new hardware features such as vertex and pixel shaders. Global illumination algorithms such as ray tracing and radiosity and their relation to real-time rendering is discussed.

Chapter 7: Non-Photorealistic Rendering. Attempting to make a scene look realistic is only one way of rendering it. This chapter discusses other styles, such as cartoon shading.

Chapter 8: Image-Based Rendering. Polygons are not always the fastest or most realistic way to describe objects or phenomena such as lens flares or fire. In this chapter, alternate representations based on using images are discussed.

Chapter 9: Acceleration Algorithms. After you make it go, make it go fast. Various forms of culling and level of detail rendering are covered here.

Chapter 10: Pipeline Optimization. Once an application is running and uses efficient algorithms, it can be made even faster using various optimization techniques. Finding the bottleneck and deciding what to do about it are the topics covered here.

Chapter 11: Polygonal Techniques. Geometric data comes from a wide range of sources, and sometimes requires modification in order to be rendered rapidly and well. This chapter discusses polygonal data and ways to clean it up and simplify it. Also included are more compact representations, such as triangle strips, fans, and meshes.

Chapter 12: Curves and Curved Surfaces. Hardware ultimately deals in points, lines, and polygons for rendering geometry. More complex surfaces offer advantages such as being able to trade off between quality and rendering speed, more compact representation, and smooth surface generation.

Chapter 13: Intersection Test Methods. Intersection testing is important for rendering, user interaction, and collision detection. In-depth coverage is provided here for a wide range of the most efficient algorithms for common geometric intersection tests.

Chapter 14: Collision Detection. Finding out whether two objects touch each other is a key element of many real-time applications. This chapter presents some efficient algorithms in the rapidly evolving field.

Chapter 15: Graphics Hardware. While graphics-hardware-accelerated algorithms have been discussed in the previous chapters, this chapter focuses on components such as color depth, frame buffers, and basic architecture types. Case studies of a few representative graphics accelerators are provided.

Chapter 16: The Future. Take a guess (we do).

We have included appendices on linear algebra and trigonometry.