Jim Blinn's Corner: A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline

by Jim Blinn

Book Overview

For almost three decades eminent computer graphicist Jim Blinn has coupled his scientific knowledge and artistic abilities to foster the growth of the computer graphics field. His many contributions include the Voyager Fly-by animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos. In addition, Blinn, the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558603875
• ISBN13: 9781558603875
• Release Date: July 1996
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great grab-bag of computer graphics topics

This book is a collection of articles written from the late 80's through the mid 90's about various computer graphics topics. Even though the book doesn't look serious, it does a very good job of explaining several rather complex computer graphics topics better than many other much more expensive textbooks on the subject. Mathematics is clearly explained when needed, and there is some pseudocode included. Since each chapter is an article totally independent of all others, I shall review each article/chapter separately: 1. How Many Ways Can You Draw a Circle? For people who can program and who can draw points and lines on some system this is a splendid introduction to the way math is used in computer graphics. The "exercises" range from easy to medium hard. 2. What, Teapots Again? Martin Newell's Teapot is the trademark of computer graphics. The GLUT library for OpenGL has a pre-computed object called the teapotahedron, right along with the dodecahedron and the icosahedron. Here are the coordinates if you want a teapotahedron of your very own in whatever graphics system you want. 3. Nested Transformations and Blobby Man This is a classic exercise in how matrix algebra makes articulation trees easy to program. It basically uses a set of scaled and translated geometric primitives such as spheres to "build up" the crude figure of a man. This chapter might be useful to robotics students looking for a project. 4. Platonic Solids The platonic solids are widely used as sample objects. They are the tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron. Blinn intends this to be a "hip pocket" program for the five platonic solids, something you can tuck away in your memory. OpenGL+GLUT has all these solids as primitives, so this is something you should study once as part of your general computer graphics education. 5. How to Write a Paper for SIGGRAPH Chapters 5,7,12 and 20 are more about programmers than about programming. It makes for amusing reading, and if you take Blinns advice to heart now, you may improve your technical writing style in other areas too. 6. Me and My (Fake) Shadow It should be mentioned beforehand that this methods merely allows shadows to be cast on flat ground. This means two things: it can only be used to cast a shadow on a flat surface AND it can only cast the shadow of one object. Blinn admits to having first attempted a hack approach to solve the problem in an unintuitive but slightly quicker way. He also presents his revised methodical approach and shows problems with it. 7. Things I Hope Not to See or Hear at SIGGRAPH Talks about what makes a bad presentation - Talks read verbatim, illegible slides, micro-sized text, magenta lines on a cyan background, the entire talk echoed on slides, the fading voice, "I'm Almost Out of Time so I'll Just Run Through the Rest of These Slides Real Fast.", "Uh, I Guess That's All I Have to Say." 8. Where Am I? What Am I Looking At? A generalization of the lookat transformation

Still a classic

This book is old enough (the original articles were written in '87-'92 - ancient history by graphics standards) that it probably isn't going to appeal to everyone, but any graphics geek should definitely check it out. Jim Blinn is a graphics god, and he shares his knowledge in an entertaining and easy-to-understand manner. As the title suggests, the topics covered center on core concepts in the graphics pipeline, such as homogenous coordinates, perspective correction, viewports, clipping, coordinate spaces, and so on. Whether you're writing a software renderer (as I am), writing shaders, or just want to better understand what goes on under the hood, you're sure to find something useful here.

THE graphics pipeline book.

I teach graphics and have been doing graphics for 15 years, and this book still taught me a lot. And it is a good book for a novice as well. I know that sounds implausible, but it really is true! Blinn just states things SO clearly. I was driven to write this review today after reading his discussion of perspective-correct rasterization: what a masterpiece! The rest of the book is just as good.

What can you say about Jim Blinn?

I am a graphics book addict, but few produce changes in my code. I passed his clipping method around to the team and we are starting to change our pipeline. We were clipping to polys in a portal engine. The new idea is to clip to a bounding rectangle FAST and let the new hardware zbuff the rough edges. His books have these sort of 'GEMS' that you might use the week you get it.

Top Book, Opaque Organisation

This book contains a wealth of information on the construction of a 3D pipeline, including all the geometry handling and also texture mapping. However being presented as it is, a collection of articles, makes a logical progression from start to finish a difficult task. There also seem to be gaps in some of the explanations, which is a shame as they are mostly complete and written in an easy to digest and lighthearted style. All in all, the book is packed with useful stuff, highly recommended.