Chapter 2, The Graphics Rendering Pipeline. This chapter deals with the heart of real-time rendering, the mechanism that takes a scene description and converts it into something we can see.
Chapter 3, Transforms. The basic tools to manipulate position, scaling, orientation, etc, of objects and the viewer are transforms.
Chapter 4, Visual Appearance. This chapter covers the definition of materials and lights and their use in achieving a realistic surface appearance. Also covered are other appearance-related topics, such as providing higher image quality through antialiasing and gamma correction.
Chapter 5, Texturing. One of the most powerful hardware-accelerated tools for real-time rendering is the ability to display data such as images on surfaces. This chapter discusses the mechanics of this technique, called texturing, and presents a wide variety of methods for applying it.
Chapter 6, Special Effects. There is more to rendering than creating surfaces, materials, and textures. This chapter presents techniques and tricks beyond the basics.
Chapter 7, Speed-Up Techniques. After you make it go, make it go fast. Various forms of culling, model representation, and geometry consolidation are covered here.
Chapter 8, Pipeline Optimization. Once an application is running and uses efficient algorithms, it can be made even faster using various optimization techniques. Finding the bottleneck and deciding what to do about it are the topics covered here.
Chapter 9, Polygonal Techniques. Geometric data comes from a wide range of sources, and sometimes requires modification in order to be rendered rapidly and well. This chapter discusses polygonal data and ways to clean it up and simplify it.
Chapter 10, Intersection Test Methods. Intersection testing is important for rendering, user interaction, and collision detection. In-depth coverage is provided here for a wide range of the most efficient algorithms for common geometric intersection tests.
Chapter 11, Collision Detection. Finding out whether two objects touch each other is a key element of many real-time applications. This chapter presents some efficient algorithms in this rapidly evolving field.
Chapter 12, Graphics Hardware. While graphics-hardware-accelerated algorithms have been discussed in the previous chapters, this chapter focuses on components such as color depth, frame buffers, and basic architecture types. Case studies of a few representative graphics accelerators are provided.
Chapter 13, The Future. Take a guess (we do).
We have included appendices on linear algebra and trigonometry.
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Last change: May 12, 1999