Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

Description

Many of Mr. Eberly's books leave me dazed and confused. His Game Physics book, though quite useful, is so wedded to the Wild Magic framework that I felt like learning that framework became the task at hand rather than trying to learn underlying algorithms. This book is different, because it is organized as a collection of tools. Each tool is pretty much independent of all the others, so you can see via the figures what Mr. Eberly is trying to accomplish, read the accompanying text and equations, and then read his pseudocode to understand what you need to do in whatever programming language you are trying to do it in. You can, in most cases, just lift out the algorithm/tool you need. This is the beauty of the book. The first three or so chapters are dedicated to giving you a quick brush-up in the underlying math, primarily linear algebra. They are useful if you just need to remember something you have already learned at some point, but it is not detailed enough to teach you from scratch. In short, this is an excellent book on the algorithms needed for the implementation of computer graphics tasks in both two and three dimensions if you already have a good big-picture understanding of computer graphics and a detailed understanding of the mathematics commonly used in such tasks.