Tag Archives: books

Seven Things for October 24, 2017

Machine learning, and especially deep learning, is all the rage, so here are some (vaguely) graphics-related tie ins:

Seven Things for April 2, 2015

I haven’t made one of these link posts for awhile. This one’s recent news, the ones to come will have more fun stuff.

sadly, human computers mostly got “calculate this boring number” assignments and very rarely got “if i was james counterstrike and i fired this rpg at this nightorc tell me how many gibs would come out”: one of history’s true missed opportunities

Seven Things for August 19, 2015

More stuff:

  • New interactive 3D graphics books at SIGGRAPH 2015: WebGL Insights, GPU Pro 6 (Kindle right now, hardcover in September). Let me know if I missed anything (see full list here, which also includes links to Google Books previews for these new books).
  • Updated book: 7th edition of the OpenGL SuperBible. I would guess that, with Vulkan coming down the pike, and Apple going with Metal and no longer developing OpenGL (it’s back in 2010 at 4.1 in Mavericks), this will be the final edition. Future students having to learn Vulkan or DirectX 12, well, that won’t be much fun at all…
  • I mentioned yesterday how you can download the SIGGRAPH 2015 Proceedings for free this week. There’s more, in theory. Some of the links there have nothing as of right now. The Posters are worth a skim, especially since I didn’t see them at SIGGRAPH. I also liked the Studio PDF. It starts with a bunch of single-page talks that are fun to snack on, followed by a few random slidesets. Emerging Tech also has longer descriptions than on the ETech page (which has more pics and videos, however). If you gotta catch ’em all, there’s also a PDF for Panels.
  • There have been many news articles recently about not viewing screens at bedtime. Right, sure. Michael Herf (former CTO at Picasa) is the president at f.lux, one company that makes screens vary in overall spectra during the day to ameliorate the problem. He pointed me at a useful-to-researchers bit: their fluxometer site, with spectra for many different displays, all downloadable.
  • Oh, and related, a tip from Michael: Pantone stickers with differing colors (using metameric failure) under different temperature lights, so you can ensure you’re showing work under consistent lighting conditions.
  • I was impressed by HALIDE, an MIT licensed open source project for writing high performance image processing code (including GPU versions) from scratch. Most impressive is their case study for local Laplacian filters (p. 28), showing great performance with considerably less code and time coding vs. Adobe Photoshop’s efforts. Google and others use it extensively (p. 32).
  • Path tracing is all the rage for the film industry; the Arnold renderer started it (AFAIK) and others have followed suit. Here’s an entertaining path trace of interior lighting for a Minecraft scene using the free Chunky path tracer. SPP is samples per pixel:

Chunk progressive render

New CRC Books

Well, newish books, from the past year. By the way, I’ve also updated our books list with all relevant new graphics books I could find. Let me know if I missed any.

This post reviews four books from CRC Press in the past year. Why CRC Press? Because they offered to send me books for review and I asked for these. I’ve listed the four books reviewed in my own order of preference, best first. Writing a book is a ton of work; I admire anyone who takes it on. I honestly dread writing a few of these reviews. Still, at the risk of being disliked, I feel obligated to give my impressions, since I was sent copies specifically for review, and I should not break that trust. These are my opinions, not my cat’s, and they could well differ from yours. Our own book would get four out of five stars by my reckoning, and lower as it ages. I’m a tough critic.

I’m also an unpaid one: I spent a few hours with each book, but certainly did not read each cover to cover (though I hope to find the time to do so with Game Engine Architecture for topics I know nothing about). So, beyond a general skim, I decided to choose a few graphics-related operations in advance and see how well each book covered them. The topics:

  • Antialiasing, since it’s important to modern applications
  • Phong shading vs. lighting, since they’re different
  • Clip coordinates, which is what vertex shaders produce

Continue reading →

Books page updated

I spent an inordinate amount of time just updating the books page at this site. It hadn’t been done for about two years – I can finally check this task off the list. It took awhile tracking down related websites for each book, especially Google Books samples, which can be quite large and worthwhile for some books. I also cleaned out older volumes from the listing and updated the recommendations list.

From what I can tell – and please do tell me if I’ve missed anything – beyond API books (OpenGL and DirectX) and the GPU Pro series, there have been very few new graphics books since 2013. The major release has been a new edition of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. There was also The CUDA Handbook, which is somewhat graphics related but not strictly so. I also included The HDRI Handbook; even though it’s more a user’s guide, it does have some good bits about the theory of tone mapping and much else, in an area that can use more coverage. I don’t bother listing the many books about Unity 3D, the Unreal Engine, etc., since those truly fall in the area of guides.

Anyway, that’s all until SIGGRAPH, when I can take a look at what else is out there.

Seven Things for February 1, 2014

Here we go:

Paper Books are Heavy and Have a Volume

I’m moving to the Boston area on Monday. One of the 258 tasks I’ve done in preparation is to deal with my bookshelves at work. I donated 13 boxes of books and journals to the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell:

pile o' books

I’m glad they took them – who knows, maybe they’ll eventually toss most of the piles in the recycling bin (despite the sign), but at least I won’t know about it. Me, I kept my ShaderX/GPU Pro and GPU Gems series books along with a few others. I’ve enjoyed accumulating a large computer graphics library over 30 years. Raise your hand if you remember Newman & Sproull – wow, you’re old (I kept that one for nostalgia’s sake). However, once it came down to actually moving these heavy boxes and finding a spot for them all in a home office, well…

In my perfect world I pay for a book once and have it accessible to me forever, in digital form so it’s easily searchable (and weighs nothing and takes up no shelf space). Kindle’s system is getting there, but kind of a pain, you have to install an application on your PC to look at your book collection, then download each book in full if you want to examine it. Strangely, from your Amazon account you can look at the parts you highlighted in a Kindle book you own, but not the book itself. (As an aside, there are some interesting stories I see arising over the next decade, such as “Amazon proves Freddy Fredhead is deceased and so deletes his Kindle account; family mourns”.)

The Graphics Codex, which has been mentioned in this blog in the past, is pretty close to that perfect world…but it used to only be on iOS. At the time it came out only my wife had an iPad, so my copy of the Codex is tied to her device. This limitation has changed in the past week: the codex is now available as a separate web edition. Pay for it, log in from anywhere, and it’s at your fingertips. There are external links to many different resources and articles. About my only complaint is waiting 2-5 seconds for a section to first load – yes, Time Warner Cable, we consumers would like faster internet connections like they have in highly developed countries such as Latvia, and I hope Google buries you (or you wake up and do some things better and be less monopolistic).</rant> After a section’s loaded it appears to be cached and is more like a second delay to fade in.

This computer graphics reference looks great and has a bit about a large number of topics. What’s particularly nice is knowing that this resource is growing and improving over time. You can even make suggestions for new sections to Morgan McGuire, its author. He’s also made it clear that the material is “Subject to Fair Use” in the About section of the Codex. Of course, every printed work is subject to fair use, but I take this explicit wording to mean I could snip a diagram or equation and use it in a classroom lecture (and credit it), later put the lecture up on the web, and not be concerned about a Cease and Desist takedown letter coming my way. Fun fact: as of today, there are 911,708 C&D notices in Chilling Effect’s database (and that collection is mostly just those received by Google).

This is a nice feature of the web edition: you can snip from the pages. One downside is that all the lovely formatting comes at a cost: you can’t copy and paste the text characters themselves from the pages displayed. That’s mostly a quibble – I need this functionality only for code, which I probably won’t want in the same style as shown, anyway. All in all, I’m happy to buy this reference in this form, knowing I can access it at any time on any device.

And there are some nice things to snip; feast your squinties on these screenshots – click on an image for the full resolution version. The Graphics Codex is not a perfect final form of all that I’d like in a book (e.g., I can’t bookmark, highlight, write in the margins), but it’s definitely a step along the way, especially in terms of accessibility, quality, and price ($10).

Graphics Codex 1

Graphics Codex 3

Graphics Codex 2 Graphics Codex 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Game Development Tools 2” CFP

Marwan Ansari has put out a call for participation for “Game Development Tools 2”. Proposals are due July 1, for publication around SIGGRAPH 2014. Among other things, Marwan’s the author of some wonderful (old but still useful) comprehensive articles on GPU image processing, freely downloadable in the “ShaderX^2 Tips and Tricks book”.

You can use Amazon’s Look Inside feature to see some of the first book in the “Game Development Tools” series, and the demos for the first book are also available.

Graphics Codex version 1.7 Released

[This is a guest post from Morgan McGuire. His Graphics Codex is a pretty great thing for anyone who wants just about all graphics formulae and algorithms at their fingertips. It’s not a perfect venue yet, but I think this is an extremely interesting alternative to books, since the app can be constantly updated and improved. With links to working code for many of the algorithms, my first question, “how do I copy and paste?”, is covered. – Eric]

The Graphics Codex 1.7 costs $9.99 on the App Store. You can install it on multiple iOS devices (I use both an iPad and an iPhone). You also receive free (approximately-) monthly updates of new content and features. It supports all iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches with iOS 5 or later [my experience is that you need iOS 6 – there’s a refresh problem with anything older; evidently Apple has changed its scrolling support], although I recommend at least an iPad 2, iPhone 3, or iPod 4.

The Graphics Codex contains about 200 entries on essential computer graphics equations, algorithms, data, and figures. These span quite a range. For example, they include: the formal definition of the BSDF, source code for a shadow map pixel shader, LaTeX commands for image formatting, and figures commonly used in teaching. For me, the historical figures are particularly fun. The staff at the Chapin rare books library helped me to track down first editions of books including Newton’s Opticks, Durer’s perspective manuscripts, and even Lambert’s work. I then scanned these so that you can get Lambert’s law from his original derivation–a kind of vicarious graphics tourism. When lecturing, I connect my iPad to the classroom projector to display these; the students use their iPhones and iPads to pull up equations and details of what I’m writing on the board.

Every month I add new entries based on what I use in my own graphics work and requests that I receive by e-mail. I read all reviews posted on iTunes as well and respond to them with changes. I currently have a queue of 44 new entries to be added. For each one, I cite a primary source and actually implement the algorithm to ensure correctness. The citations include links to canonical (e.g., ACM Digital Library) and free (e.g., author version) PDFs in most cases, so you can quickly jump directly to the source to learn more. Since many functions are also supported under various APIs, I link to DirectX, OpenGL, Mitsuba, etc., documentation as well.

In addition to the reference material, version 1.7 includes “Lecture Notes on Rendering”: twelve long-form chapters suitable for use in an introductory (ray tracing) computer graphics course. This semester I taught graphics at Williams College using this as the primary reading material. I supplemented it with a few chapters from Fundamentals of Computer Graphics 3rd edition, Computer Graphics: Principles & Practice 3rd edition [to be released May 6, 2013 – Morgan is a coauthor], and two research papers: Kajiya’86 and Jensen ’96. The next three chapters I will add in future updates are deep explanations of Photon Mapping, Importance Sampling, and Color Theory. All of these can be used with any API, but are explicitly supported by the open source G3D Innovation Engine graphics library. G3D now includes a complete photon mapping ray tracer that matches the notation and structure of the renderers described in the lecture notes.

On the technical side, I completely rewrote the layout and scrolling engine for this release. The new GPU-accelerated version allows scrolling before layout completes, making even the longest chapters respond nearly instantly. The underlying code uses LaTeX for math typesetting and that runs on a second thread, so if you scroll really fast you’ll see the equations inserted as they are completed. I use dynamic layout instead of static (e.g., PDF) so that content can respond to changing device orientation and re-layout on font change rather than forcing the reader to scroll horizontally. This version also includes support for iPhone 5, iPod 5, and iPad mini resolutions and processors. I recommend using the latest iOS version 6.0.1 because that has the best GPU drivers, but the app supports everything back to iOS 5.1.

I can’t stress enough how liberating and rewarding it has been as an author to release material as an app instead of a book. There are no delays because I release content incrementally instead of in discrete editions, and the quality remains uncompromised by artificial publishing and marketing deadlines–I only release material when it is polished. Direct feedback from readers allows me to support them with appropriate content, and there are zero known errors; as soon as errata is collected, I simply patch the content and push it out to everyone. Selling for 10-20% of the cost of a textbook allows me to reach the hobbyists, indie developers, and students who will be tomorrow’s great developers and researchers. The down side, of course, is that I rely on “word of mouth” (e.g., blogs and Twitter) to promote the app, whereas traditional publications have marketing budgets and campaigns. Now that the app has a critical mass of content, I’m starting to promote it more actively. I look forward to readers letting me know what new features and entries to add in future months.

[p.s. here are links for the Graphics Codex homepage, and Morgan’s twitter feed (actually, he has two) and blog.]

Seven Things for October 28, 2012