Hughes/Computer Graphics, 3/E

Contents

Preface

About the Authors

1 Introduction

Graphics is a broad field; to understand it, you need information from perception, physics, mathematics, and engineering. Building a graphics application entails user-interface work, some amount of modeling (i.e., making a representation of a shape), and rendering (the making of pictures of shapes). Rendering is often done via a “pipeline” of operations; one can use this pipeline without understanding every detail to make many useful programs. But if we want to render things accurately, we need to start from a physical understanding of light. Knowing just a few properties of light prepares us to make a first approximate renderer.

1.1 An Introduction to Computer Graphics

1.1.1 The World of Computer ...