A book I know nothing about, but from updating the books page I think I’ll get, is the OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook. A reviewer on Gamasutra gives it strong praise, as do all the Amazon customer reviews.

One I’ve left off for now is Programming GPUs, which I expect is focused on computing with the GPU (no rendering), judging from the author’s background as a quant (his bio’s cute). I also left off a heckuva lot of books on using the Unity engine, to keep the list focused on direct programming vs. using higher-level SDKs.

Along the way I noticed a nice little blog called Video Game Math, by Fletcher Dunn and Ian Parberry, who recently released a second edition of their 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development. Which is pretty good, by the way. My mini-review/endorsement: “With solid theory and references, along with practical advice borne from decades of experience, all presented in an informal and demystifying style, Dunn & Parberry provide an accessible and useful approach to the key mathematical operations needed in 3D computer graphics.” There’s an extensive Google Books sample of much of the first few chapters.

In the “old but awesome and free” category this time is Light And Color – A Golden Guide. Check it out before there’s some takedown notice sent out. Yes, it’s small, it’s colorful, and some bits are dated, but there are some pretty good analogies and explanations in there. No kidding. Lots more Golden Guides here (including, incredibly, this one).

I did find that there’s a new edition of “Real Time Rendering“ out, which was a surprise. The subtitle is the best: “Aalib, Aces of ANSI Art”. It’s even sold by Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. Happily, I couldn’t find it on Amazon, so maybe they’re scaling back on carrying these so-called books. This particular book is a paperback, and more expensive than the real thing (I like to think our’s is real – it’s the dash between “Real” and “Time” that keeps it real for me). Or I should say it’s more expensive unless you buy ours from these “double your intelligence or no money back” sellers. I believe this phenomenon is from computers tracking competitors’ prices and each one jacking up prices in response.

In case you missed my posts on Betascript Publishing, go here – short version is that they use a computer program to find related articles on Wikipedia, put on a cover (usually the most creative part of the process), and sell it. I’d be interested to know which book is better, their computer-generated one or my own Wikipedia-derived followup, GGGG:RTRtR (Game GPU Graphics Gems: Real-Time Rendering the Redux), reviewed by me here. I really should read my own book some day, there look to be some interesting Wikipedia articles in there.

Finally, I like the concept of book autopsies:

The GPU Pro series is essentially a continuation of the ShaderX series, just with a different publisher. I was given a look at the draft of this latest volume, and it appears in line with the others: some eminently practical and battle-tested approaches mixed with some pie-in-the-sky out-of-the-box done-with-the-metaphors ideas – having a mix keeps things lively. Articles such as the one covering the CryENGINE 3 is a fine combination of both, with solid algorithms alongside “this doesn’t always work but looks great when it does” concepts. Some of the material (including a fair bit of the CryENGINE 3 article) can be gleaned from presentations online from GDC and SIGGRAPH, but here it’s all polished and put in one place. Other articles are entirely fresh and new. Priced reasonably for a full-color book, it’s a volume that most graphics developers will find of interest.

Bonus thing: Draw a curve of your data for a number of years and see what it most closely correlates. Peculiar.

For a long time, I’ve found ATI’s (now AMD’s) CubeMapGen library to be an indispensable tool for creating prefiltered environment maps (important for physically based shading). Many older GPUs (all the ones in current consoles) do not filter across cube faces. CubeMapGen solves this problem and others – details can be found in a GDC presentation and a SIGGRAPH sketch, both from 2005.

Support for CubeMapGen has been spotty for the last few years, and a while ago AMD officially declared its end of life. Since then I’ve been wondering when AMD would open-source this important tool – there is a good precedent in NVIDIA texture tools, which has been open source for several years now.

Speaking of NVIDIA texture tools, a comment on its Google Code website just let me know that AMD has released source to CubeMapGen. A link to the source for version 1.4 can be found on the bottom of the CubeMapGen page. Note that this does not include the DXT compression part of the edge fixup (which was a pretty nifty feature – hopefully someone will reimplement it now that the library is open source).

Looking at the license doc in the zip file, the license appears to be a modified BSD license. This is excellent news – tools like this are far more useful when source is available. Perhaps someone should host the code on Google Code or github, to make it easier to add future improvements – or maybe it could be folded into the nvidia_texture_tools code base (if the license allows).

I hope to post on a bunch of stuff soon, but wanted to first mention something now available: the slides and videos presented in the popular SIGGRAPH course “Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics”. Find them here, and the page for previous years (well, currently just 2010) here. Hats off to Natalya Tatarchuk and all the speakers for quickly making this year’s presentations available.

An Autodesk Assistance Program participant is either a veteran or unemployed individual who has (a) previously worked in the architecture, engineering, design or manufacturing industries, has completed the online registration for the Autodesk Assistance Program, and upon request by Autodesk is able to provide proof of eligibility for that program.

This is a nice thing.