Monthly Archives: April 2015

Web Page Updates

To celebrate Kavita Bala becoming the new Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, I updated the ancient resource pages I put there long ago:

I think the links here are fairly useful, in part due to great suggestions from people on Twitter – get them while they’re fresh. Let me know what other cool things I’m missing.

I also update our own site’s portal page and graphics books page for good measure. One cool new link on the portal page is for Shader School, for learning shader programming, which a few people have recommended. The shader compile error messages are unfortunately obscured on some platforms, but if all else fails you can check the answers.

Why not?

I like to ask researchers whether they think the release of code should be encouraged, if not required, for technical papers. My argument (stolen from somewhere) is, “would you allow someone to publish an analysis of Hamlet but not allow anyone to see Hamlet itself?” The main argument for publishing the code (beyond helping the world as a whole) is that people can check your work, which I hear is a part of this science stuff in “computer science.”
       
Often they’re against it. The two reasons I hear are “my code sucks” and “we’ve patented the technique.” I can also imagine, “I don’t want those commercial fatcats stealing my code,” to which I say, “put some ridiculous license on it, then.” If the reason is, “I want to publish to enhance my resume and reputation, but I also want to keep it all secret because I’m going to make money off it,” then choose A or B, you can’t have both (or shouldn’t, in my Utopian fantasy world).

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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

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