Readings 07: Readings for October 13-17

by Mike Gleicher on October 10, 2014

For this week, we’re going to be discussing how the graphics hardware draws 3D stuff for us, and how to make it do so.

Unfortunately, for the basic ideas, there isn’t anything to read – we’ll discuss it in class.

Inter-twined with this discussion is the discussion of lighting. It’s hard to talk about the pipeline / shading without first introducing lighting. So we’ll actually discuss lighting as part of the discussion of shading. So, for this week, it’s OK to “read behind” the lectures. You’ll want to read this stuff – but you don’t need to do it right away.

Lighting Readings:

  • Chapter 10: Surface Shading in Fundamentals of Computer Graphics. We won’t do much with 10.3 (Artistic Shading) – but you should read it for interest anyway. The rest of the chapter is a concise intro to what you need to know.
  • Chapter 5: Lighting in the OpenGL Red Book. Be careful: most of this is trying to show you the baroque way that the older versions of OpenGL forced us to specify lighting. It’s good to get a sense of what you can do, but don’t worry about all the weird details of how OpenGL’s lighting commands work. They’ll be done for you in Project 1, and you’ll get to implement lighting for yourself in Project 2.
  • Chapter 5: Visual Appearance in Real Time Rendering. The Sections up to (and including 5.5) get at shading in a really thorough way. 5.6 and beyond is stuff we’ll come back to when we discuss image processing.

Shaders Readings:

Unfortunately, there is nothing that gives a good overview of the pipeline. You can review Chapter  8 of Fundamentals, but mainly you’ll need to rely on what we discuss in class.

Similarly, most of the things about shaders get too much into the nitty gritty details of how to write and use them. Chapter 15 of the OpenGL Red Book is a good place to start on that. But really, you’ll want to come back to this when its time to start writing shaders.

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