The Computer Graphics Library

http://fabiensanglard.net/Computer_Graphics_Principles_and_Practices/index.php

by lispython • 12 years ago

111 20 12 years ago

fabiensanglard.net

sekasi• 12 years ago

For anyone curious in the field, there's a version of Michael Abrash's black book publicly available at github;

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

jheriko4• 12 years ago

although its labelled and oft quoted as such the black book is really an optimisation manual in disguise imo.

the content on graphics is virtually non-existent except for outdated information about old hardware interfaces from a time before DirectX, OpenGL and any particularly friendly rendering interfaces (so there was GDI and Win32 for early Windows, but we weren't yet in the time where programmers could spunk away resources and the hardware suck it up without destroying your performance).

there is some discussion on VSD techniques, the bresenham line algorithm etc. but these are also outdated - libraries today draw lines for us and even AAA games can ship without giving a serious crap about culling and hit framerate...

i do still highly recommend reading it, just don't expect to learn anything useful about graphics. my main takeaway from this book was 'optimise by measuring then experimenting and measuring to confirm the optimisation'. its so obvious but a large number of programmers i've worked with seem to prefer to guess and not measure...

clarry3• 12 years ago

I actually started reading the book slowly a few days ago, and am now in Chapter 17. So far there hasn't been anything about graphics; it's been mostly about low-level optimization and discussion of differences between 8086, 286, 386, and 486... yes, it's that outdated. There are some ideas that apply more generally (optimize your design and algorithms first, profile or measure, etc.). I don't think you need a book to learn these things, and I think they're close enough to common sense (for programmers) now anyway.

Having said that, I still find the book interesting, and I can't wait to get to the part where Mr. Abrash gets to talk about the software rendering in Quake (which he worked on). It might be outdated information for most of you, but I'm actually interested in seeing how far you could push software rendering with modern CPUs; it's sad that progress on that front pretty much ended around the time Unreal was released. If it was good enough for games back in the 90s, why wouldn't it be good for games in 2014?

If someone else here happens to be interested in 90s software rendering, make sure you read this bit about the Thief engine.. :-)

http://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html

pjmlp• 12 years ago

You missed out on WinG.

As a side note it is quite hard to find anything WinG related nowadays, even as historical curiosity.

angersock• 12 years ago

It's still handy stuff somewhat if you're targeting something like an arduino.

simias• 12 years ago

The link towards the "shadow mapping article" seems broken, it's this one: http://fabiensanglard.net/shadowmapping/index.php

arsupertec• 12 years ago

ahaan, gotcha..

octopus• 12 years ago

Nice list of books. I think I read Fundamentals of interactive Computer graphics (1st edition) around 1999 :).

mzs• 12 years ago

Around '93 for me, the plates with the Xwing blew me away.

z3phyr• 12 years ago

Off-Topic : What are some of the unsolved problems of graphics programming? Realistic Animations?

mjn• 12 years ago

I haven't followed progress recently, but one question that's gotten some research is how to make GPU-ized raytracing work on dynamic scenes. Static scenes can be handled fairly well by preprocessing data into efficient spatial data structures like KD-trees or octrees. For example, here's an nVidia paper from 2009 that raytraces scenes made up of huge numbers of voxels, using a representation called a sparse voxel octree: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.156...

Last time I looked at this research, though, how to handle highly dynamic scenes efficiently was a bit of an open question. It seems to largely be a data-structure research problem.

blt2• 12 years ago

Hair, fur, and fabrics, while huge progress has been made, still don't look totally realistic.

jlas• 12 years ago

No love for the Shirley book? That's what we used at CMU.

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Peter-S...

The Computer Graphics Library

Related Stories