Graphics Gems

Computer graphics is in many ways a science, but writing the programs that actually generate attractive images is still an art. The best programmers have a large toolbox of general techniques, nuggets of algorithms, and clever insights that they use on a daily basis to make their code faster, more reliable, more accurate, easier to debug, and a pleasure to use. Such toolboxes are compiled through years of experience and trading with other professionals. This book contains some of the best contents of those toolboxes, collected from over 50 different programmers around the world. Between these covers are more than 100 different ideas, methods, and techniques that anyone can use in graphics programming, ranging from basic geometry to specific algorithms in fields like anti-aliased line drawing, texture mapping, splines, and polygon rendering. Many of these techniques contain public domain implementations in the C language which are complete and ready-to-run. GRAPHICS GEMS was written by professional graphics programmers. The tools in this book are immediately helpful in writing programs that are clean, fast, and elegant.