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Blender Master Class: A Hands-On Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering
By Ben Simonds
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Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders
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By Kelly Dempski, Emmanuel Viale Published October 2004 List Price: Amazon.com Sales Rank: 786,421 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Summary: A careful look at the real world and you begin to realize that most of the detail you see is a result of subtle lighting effects. Your perception of reality is affected by very subtle changes in the way light interacts with the objects around you. Therefore, if your goal is to recreate reality (or to create a new reality), you must include as many of these effects as possible. This book starts by explaining the underlying principles of lighting theory, but distinguishes itself from most titles quickly by providing practical examples using specific techniques to detail the theory. Topics include the physics of light, modeling real-world light, raytracing and related techniques, objects and materials, lighting and reflectance models, implementing lights in shaders, spherical harmonic lighting, spherical harmonics in DirectX, and real-time radiosity. The CD-ROM contains all of the source code used in the sample applications. The applications were written with OpenGL and DirectX. In some cases, both are used for a given technique. In other cases, only one is used either because the other implementation is unnecessary (it is supported in a helper library like D3DX, for example) or because porting one implementation to another is trivial (like using HLSL shaders in an penGL/cg environment).
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1 Comments
Given the speed at which API's (and their SDK's) are changing I find the more theoretical/abstract texts offer substantially better value for money. The lighting models discussed throughout this book have been around for a long time, and will continue to be useful for real-time graphics in years to come. The API's will change, but the theory stays the same - making this book a worthwhile investment.
The writing style and general coverage is excellent - despite the "advanced" in it's title, you don't need to be an advanced graphics programmer to get a lot of useful information out of it.
4 stars because:
For reference: http://www.advancedrenderingtechniques.com/ is the books homepage.