Books at GDC

I haven’t listed out new(ish) books for awhile, so here are a bunch. If you’re at GDC, you can take a look at most of them in the exhibitors hall. There’s also a high-quality volume free for download (or pay $81.38, if you prefer), so read on.

Three that are hot off the press:

GPU Pro 2, Wolfgang Engel ed., AK Peters – The next in the series (which continues the ShaderX series), and it looks like there’s a fair bit of chew in there. See the approximate table of contents here. Me, I’m particularly interested in the MLAA article; there’s a preview, moview, and more here.

GPU Computing Gems, Emerald Edition, Wen-Mei W. Hwu ed., Morgan Kaufmann – the GPGPU topics covered are all over the map, and unfortunately the two reviews on Amazon are not positive, but I’d like to page through it nonetheless and see what it’s like. Table of contents and sample chapters here.

Game Engine Gems 2, Eric Lengyel ed., AK Peters – More nuts and bolts and about game engines in general, take a look at the table of contents here.

There are also a few other graphics-related books that have come out in the past year that we haven’t mentioned here yet:

Game Physics Pearls, Gino van den Bergen and Dirk Gregorius ed., AK Peters – I’m not a user of game physics so can’t really judge this one, but thought it nice that the book has a progression to it: there’s an introductory chapter about the field, then practical articles about collision detection and simulation of various types of physical phenomena.

Polygon Mesh Processing, Mario Botsch, Leif Kobbelt, Mark Pauly, Pierre Alliez, Bruno Levy, AK Peters – This is a serious overview of research done on mesh-related algorithms, starting with data structures and covering such topics as smoothing, simplification, mesh repair, and deformations.

The rest are not directly related to interactive rendering, but are books I’ve wanted to page through. They’re all from Springer, who doesn’t appear to be exhibiting at GDC this year, so I guess they’re mostly be for sampling online:

Computer Vision, Richard Szeliski, Springer – Written by an expert in the field, I’ve heard this is a good guide to the subject. Super cool thing: the final draft of this book is free for download on his website. Much of Chapter 3 looks like a good read for interactive rendering programmers.

Mathematics for Computer Graphics, John Vince, Springer – I like to see such books, and have heard this one’s pretty good. It certainly starts out from the basics, though some topics covered seem unrelated (at least to me) to graphics.

Production Rendering, Ian Stephenson ed., Springer – definitely not interactive rendering, but it sounded like an interesting collection of articles from seven experts in the field. The last chapter in particular, “Rendering Gems”, looks pretty chewy. Perversely, Amazon’s “Look Inside” does not show you all of the Table of Contents, but Google’s excerpt does. Update: this turns out to be an old volume from 2004 I hadn’t noticed before (Springer books are usually too expensive for me, so I don’t tend to track them), one that Amazon mistakenly lists as having come out in November 2010 – see the comments below.

I’m betting I’ve missed other new books, so let us know by adding a comment.

3 thoughts on “Books at GDC

  1. friedlinguini

    Production Rendering is actually a few years old, unless there’s a new edition I haven’t heard of. It’s basically a book on implementing a RenderMan renderer. Early chapters are on implementing REYES, while later ones get into things like adding photon mapping.

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