Fundamentals of Computer Graphics

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1. johnnyanmacDec 2023
   CRC has books in pretty much every subject (in and outside of software), so it really comes down to what kinds of topics you are interested in. I can give a dozen recommendation for books in computer graphics, but that may not be helpful for you personally.

   But if you are are into graphics programming:

   -Peter Shirley's Fundamentals of Computer Graphics is a great comprehensive resource. Despite the name, it serves as a great jumping off point even for experts into a different subdomain if they don't know where to start

   - Johnathan Cooper's Game Anim is one of my most recent purachases. A great overview of the animation process, from the views of both the artist and technical engineer. Not just great for concepts but to get an idea of how and where a large studio executes their workkflow in production.

   - Most of the GPU series from Wolfgang Engel are worth their weight in gold. The 7 or so GPU Pro series is basically whitepapers on all sorts of (at the time) cutting edge rendering techniques. Then the "GPU Pro 360" books are there if you wanted to focus on a specific subdomain instead of looking across the pro books (e.g. a GPU Pro 360 book focusing on Lighting or Image processing)

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2. generic_userOct 2016
   While its true that you probably do not need to be very good at math to do basic graphics, you do need 'some' math. You need to be able to understand the basic algorithms of the graphics pipeline to use them correctly and experiment. The best source for a detailed and 'gentile' intro is still one of the introduction to computer graphic books. You can sit with a pad of paper and work through some of the formulas on paper until you understand what they do.

   One of my favorites, because it does not use any particular language and the math derivations are detailed and easy to fallow.

   Fundamentals of Computer Graphics - Shirley https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Peter-...

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3. tomvbusselAug 2015
   I think this is aimed at middle/high school students. It probably can be interesting for adults, but I'd really recommend picking up a book such as Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Shirley and Marschner [1].

   [1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/fcg3/

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4. solidangleJul 2015
   If you're interested in writing a renderer yourself (which is obviously way cooler than using some tools), I'd recommend first picking up either "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics" by Shirley and Marschner or "Computer Graphics: Principles & Practices" by Foley and Van Dam. Once you understand the basics of computer graphics and especially of shading and ray tracing, I'd recommend picking up "Physically Based Rendering: From theory to implementation" by Pharr and Humphreys which is an excellent book that explains the State of the Art of photorealistic rendering. Once you understand how physically based rendering, path tracing, BSDFs and all that good stuff works you're ready to write your own rendering (or to implement a new SIGGRAPH paper in the framework provided by the book). It's a lot of fun writing your own renderer and you'll produce some beautiful pictures.
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5. nzmsvJul 2010
   I found Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley to be a great intro book. Yes, it's a textbook, but it's one of the better written ones. I like that it also teaches you how to code the algorithms, not just the math behind them. It's not OpenGL-focused though.
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6. snowcrshdMar 2017
   How does that book compares to Peter Shirley's Fundamentals of computer graphics [1]

   I'm interested in CG but don't really know where to start.

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Fourth...

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