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

by Jim Blinn

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 recipient of the first SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling.Blinn shares his insight and experience in "Jim Blinn's Corner," an award-winning column in the technical magazine IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in which he unveils his most useful graphics methods and observations. This book, a compendium of 20 of the column's articles, leads you through the "graphics pipeline" offering a wealth of tips and tricks. It explores common graphics problems, many of which have never before been addressed.An invaluable resource for any graphics professionalIn his entertaining and inspirational style, Blinn examines a variety of topics to help computer graphics software and application developers recognize and solve graphics programming problems. Focusing on geometry and the graphics pipeline, he

Genres: Technical, Computer Science, Textbooks

214 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of tips & tricks for working in graphics, for example 20 different ways to draw a circle, how to easily draw shadows, and why homogeneous coordinates are awesome.

My favorite part of the book was actually the last chapter, where Jim explains why he finally moved from Fortran to C++.

First, why did he use Fortran for so long? Because once you use a language for a long time you build an internal sense for smelly code that helps you identify problems.

And why did he switch? There were a few features of the language that made it more convenient over Fortran, sure. But most of all because he felt that C++ was a language that wasn't going to disappear for a long time, whereas many of his early code written in PDP assembly will never run any more. Makes me wonder how long Java and C# are going to be around for...

Three stars because while some chapters were quite engaging, others were too advanced for me to follow. Or, maybe I just didn't have the patience to get through the math. I would get lost in a diagram or equation early on, and couldn't get through the rest of the chapter. Felt that way for about half of them. Maybe if I had somebody well-versed in graphics to help me get through those parts, I'd enjoy it more.

[Stirling Westrup · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating as a historical artifact and there are some valuable takeaways but in general the contents are now obsolete.