PROCEDURAL ELEMENTS for COMPUTER GRAPHICS, 2nd Edition

by

David F. Rogers

WCB/McGraw-Hill, 1998, ISBN 0-07-053548-5

SYNOPSIS:

The second edition of this classic computer graphics book represents a major rewrite. The book is of special interest to students, programmers and computer graphics professionals. Major new additions include graphical user interfaces, ellipse, image compression and antialiased line algorithms. Clipping algorithms now include those by Liang-Barsky and Nicholl-Lee-Nicholl as well as the classical Cohen-Sutherland, midpoint, Cyrus-Beck and Sutherland-Hodgman algorithms. In addition to the classical algorithms including the floating horizon, Roberts, Warnock, Weiler-Atherton, Catmull subdivision, Z-buffer, Newell-Newell-Sancha, and Watkins algorithms the visible surface chapter now includes the Appel, haloed line, A-buffer, BSP, octree and marching cube algorithms. The original visible surface ray tracing discussion is much expanded. In addition to discussion of Gouraud and Phong shading, the rendering chapter now includes significant additional discussion of physically based illumination models, transparency, shadows, textures, and cone, beam, pencil and stochastic ray tracing. The fundamentals of radiosity are covered in detail. In addition to the original color material, material on uniform color spaces and a detailed discussion of gamma correction along with color image quantization and color reproduction for print media are added. However, the book retains the detailed worked examples from the first edition as well as presenting new ones - a total of 90 worked examples.

COVERS:

Front Cover: Image created by Peter Kipfer and Francois Sillion using hierarchical radiosity lighting simulation software developed under the direction of Francois Sillion and George Drettakis. The image was created at the iMAGIS project GRAVIR/IMAG-INRIA (Grenoble, France) in consultation with the author in Annapolis, MD. The entire project was accomplished electronically from initial concept to final images. The image incorporates the simple block structure from the first edition to illustrate the vast improvements in rendering capability since the first edition was published in 1985. The only light in the front room is from the sunlight coming through the window. There are 287 initial surfaces in 157 clusters. Adaptive subdivision resulted in 1,861,974 links. Calculation time was 135 minutes on a 195 Mhz MIPS R10000 at 1800 x 1200 pixels. Image Copyright (C) 1997 Francois Sillion, Peter Kipfer and David F. Rogers. All rights reserved.

Back cover: The image shows an adaptively subdivided coarse mesh, created with a factor of 30 increase in the error metric, superimposed over the front cover image. Image Copyright (C) 1997 Francois Sillion, Peter Kipfer and David F. Rogers. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David F. Rogers is a computer graphics pioneer with nearly 30 years of experience He is also an aeronautical engineer. He has written four textbooks including Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics and edited several additional volumes. His books have been translated into six languages. He has published over 50 technical papers in computer graphics and aeronautics. Author's short biography

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics, 2nd ed
by the same author and his long time colleague J. Alan Adams covers topics in two- and three-dimensional transformations, plane and space curves including cubic splines, parabolically blended, Bezier and nonrational and rational B-spline curves. A thorough introduction to surfaces of revolution, sweep surfaces, bilinear, ruled, Coons, Bezier, B-spline and NURBS (rational B-spline) surfaces is also included.