Product Description

Today truly useful and interactive graphics are available on affordable computers. While hardware progress has been impressive, widespread gains in software expertise have come more slowly. Information about advanced techniques-beyond those learned in introductory computer graphics texts-is not as easy to come by as inexpensive hardware.

This book brings the graphics programmer beyond the basics and introduces them to advanced knowledge that is hard to obtain outside of an intensive CG work environment. The book is about graphics techniques-those that don't require esoteric hardware or custom graphics libraries-that are written in a comprehensive style and do useful things. It covers graphics that are not covered well in your old graphics textbook. But it also goes further, teaching you how to apply those techniques in real world applications, filling real world needs.

* Emphasizes the algorithmic side of computer graphics, with a practical application focus, and provides usable techniques for real world problems.
* Serves as an introduction to the techniques that are hard to obtain outside of an intensive computer graphics work environment.
* Sophisticated and novel programming techniques are implemented in C using the OpenGL library, including coverage of color and lighting; texture mapping; blending and compositing; antialiasing; image processing; special effects; natural phenomena; artistic and non-photorealistic techniques, and many others.
* Code fragments are used in the book, and full blown example programs for virtually every algorithm are available at www.mkp.com/opengl

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134116 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 672 pages

Review
"I've been using the techniques in this book since their introduction at SIGGRAPH years ago. Those notes, transformed into this superb book, have been the quintessential reference for advanced techniques in OpenGL. Every corner of the subject is analyzed, with enough detail for the expert, but also very readable for the novice. Congratulations to David and Tom for providing an excellent OpenGL reference!"
-Dave Shreiner, Silicon Graphics, Inc., co-author of OpenGL Programming Guide

"You may think you know OpenGL. As a software engineer with ten years of OpenGL experience, I thought I did. However, this book quickly convinced me that I was very much mistaken. David Blythe and Tom McReynolds have taught me much that I did not know, and in the process improved my company's products.

This is a book for computer graphics enthusiasts, both amateur and professional. If you use OpenGL in your work, Advanced Graphics Programming using OpenGL will be your constant companion. Be sure to get your own copy, however - my copy is not leaving my desk under any circumstances!"
-Ian Ashdown, President, byHeart Consultants Limited

From the Back Cover
I've been using the techniques in this book since their introduction at SIGGRAPH years ago. Those notes, transformed into this superb book, are the quintessential reference for advanced techniques in OpenGL. Every corner of the subject is analyzed with enough detail for the expert, but remains very readable for the novice. Congratulations to David and Tom for providing an excellent OpenGL reference!
Dave Shreiner, Silicon Graphics, Inc., co-author of OpenGL Programming Guide

You may think you know OpenGL. As a software engineer with ten years of OpenGL experience, I thought I did. However, this book quickly convinced me that I was very much mistaken. David Blythe and Tom McReynolds have taught me much that I did not know, and in the process improved my company's products. This is a book for computer graphics enthusiasts, both amateur and professional. If you use OpenGL in your work, Advanced Graphics Programming using OpenGL will be your constant companion. Be sure to get your own copy, however-my copy is not leaving my desk under any circumstances!
Ian Ashdown, President, byHeart Consultants Limited


Today truly useful and interactive graphics are available on affordable computers. While hardware progress has been impressive, widespread gains in software expertise have come more slowly. Information about advanced techniques-beyond those learned in introductory computer graphics texts-is not as easy to come by as inexpensive hardware.

This book brings the graphics programmer beyond the basics and introduces them to advanced knowledge that is hard to obtain outside of an intensive CG work environment. The book is about graphics techniques-those that don't require esoteric hardware or custom graphics libraries-that are written in a comprehensive style and do useful things. It covers graphics that are not covered well in your old graphics textbook. But it also goes further, teaching you how to apply those techniques in real world applications, filling real world needs:

* Emphasizes the algorithmic side of computer graphics, with a practical application focus, and provides usable techniques for real world problems.
* Serves as an introduction to the techniques that are hard to obtain outside of an intensive computer graphics work environment.
* Sophisticated and novel programming techniques are implemented in C using the OpenGL library, including coverage of color and lighting; texture mapping; blending and compositing; antialiasing; image processing; special effects; natural phenomena; artistic and non-photorealistic techniques, and many others.
* Code fragments are used in the book, and full blown example programs for virtually every algorithm are available at www.mkp.com/opengl

About the Author
Tom McReynolds has worked on 3D graphics at Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Gigapixel, 3DFX, and NVIDIA. He has worked in software organizations, writing graphics libraries and drivers, and on the hardware side, writing simulators and verification software for 3D hardware. He presented 3D graphics courses at a number of SIGGRAPH conferences, as well as at a number of Silicon Graphics Developer conferences, an X technical conference, and at LinuxWorld. Tom is currently managing a development team to 3D graphics drivers for embedded GPUs at NVIDIA, and contributing to the evolution of OpenGL-ES by participating in the Khronos working group.

David Blythe has worked in the 3D graphics field professionally for the last 14 years, including serving as Chief Engineer at Silicon Graphics, a representative on the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, editor for the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification, and a frequent SIGGRAPH course presenter. While at Silicon Graphics, David contributed to the development of the RealityEngine and InfiniteReality graphics systems. He has worked extensively on implementations of the OpenGL graphics library, OpenGL extension specifications, and high-level toolkits built on top of OpenGL. David's other industry experience includes embedded and system-on-a-chip design, mobile devices, and wireless networking. David is currently a graphics architect in the Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies division at Microsoft working on DirectX and OpenGL graphics technologies.

Customer Reviews

Take your OpenGL skills to the next level
Since its first release in 1992, OpenGL has been rapidly adopted as the graphics API of choice for real-time interactive 3D graphics applications. The OpenGL state machine is easy to understand, but its simplicity and orthogonality enable a multitude of interesting effects that require more room than can be accommodated in the OpenGL "Red Book". The objective of this book is to demonstrate how to generate more satisfying images using OpenGL in general, and how to achieve some sophisticated results in particular. There are three general areas of discussion: basic OpenGL concepts, basic techniques, and advanced techniques.
The first part of the book goes over some of the more basic OpenGL material - 3D transformations, color, shading, and lighting. Although the second part of the book - basic techniques - may look old hat at first, it does cover some interesting subjects such as deferred shading and image processing techniques that you don't normally think of as wedded to computer graphics. The best part of the book, to me, is part 3 on advanced techniques. In particular the chapters on scene realism, natural detail, illustration and artistic techniques, and scientific visualization have very unique material on them that reveal algorithmic details along with enlightening illustrations and pseudocode. The reader of this book should already be familiar with performing computer graphics using OpenGL and also be somewhat mathematically sophisticated considering that mathematics is heavily used in this book. All of the code for the methods and effects used at this book are in a zipfile at the book's website. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has gone through the "OpenGL Programming Guide" and wants to take their computer graphics skills to the next level.
One of the authors of this book does have an extensive tutorial freely available on the web that is an older subset of this book, so you might want to check it out and see if you like his writing style before you purchase. Type "Advanced Graphics Programming Techniques Using OpenGL" into Google and the first address listed should be the author's tutorial. It is no longer on OpenGL.org as far as I can tell.

A new review (again)
I posted a review before, but I decided again to change it. Everything I said I will repeat more or less.

There is a paper on OpenGL.org written by an author, and much of that paper's info is in the book. It is not a direct reprint though. I was disappointed because I had an immediate impression it was just a total reprint of a free document. Also, the book is not hand-on at all, you really have to know your way around OpenGL to implement the techniques. It's not a quick teach-yourself-OpenGL book.

Now, I came back to update my review, because the first few chapters are crammed full of info that is really, really good. Well worth the money for the book. If you really want to know OpenGL on the inside... this book is it. It's just alot of reading, and very little hands-on. And some info in here you can find on OpenGL.org, but much newer techniques are covered to.

So I bumped it back to 5 stars, and it is an honest review. It is really worth it for these deep chapters, not for code techniques. Don't buy it unless you really already have a good handle on GL you will not be able to figure much out.

Excellent Intermediate Level Book
Today there are many books for pro (GPU Gems, ShaderX etc), many for beginners (superbible, redbook, orange book etc), but practically no for intermediate level. This is one of them. It's well written and tells the basics of advanced 3D algorithms: batching, env mapping, bump mapping etc.
Disadvantages are:
-too short articles on difficult topics
-too much (for me) about CADs
-somewhat old (using pbuffers instead of FBOs)
P. S.
The link for source codes from the book doesn't work, use the following one: [...]