Mathematical Topics from 3D Graphics - 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development - page 343

Chapter 10
Mathematical Topics
from 3D Graphics
I don't think there's anything wrong with pretty graphics.
— Shigeru Miyamoto (1952-)
This chapter discusses a number of mathematical issues that arise when
creating 3D graphics on a computer. Of course, we cannot hope to cover
the vast subject of computer graphics in any amount of detail in a single
chapter. Entire topics are written that merely survey the topic. This
chapter is to graphics what this entire book is to interactive 3D applications:
it presents an extremely brief and high level overview of the subject matter,
focusing on topics for which mathematics plays a critical role. Just like the
rest of this topic, we try to pay special attention to those topics that, from
our experience, are glossed over in other sources or are a source of confusion
in beginners.
To be a bit more direct: this chapter alone is not enough to teach
you how to get some pretty pictures on the screen. However, it should be
used parallel with (or preceding!) some other course, book, or self-study on
graphics, and we hope that it will help you breeze past a few traditional
sticky points. Although we present some example snippets in High Level
Shading Language (HLSL) at the end of this chapter, you will not find
much else to help you figure out which DirectX or OpenGL function calls
to make to achieve some desired effect. These issues are certainly of supreme
practical importance, but alas, they are also in the category of knowledge
that Robert Maynard Hutchins dubbed “rapidly aging facts,” and we have
tried to avoid writing a book that requires an update every other year when
ATI releases a new card or Microsoft a new version of DirectX. Luckily, up-
to-date API references and examples abound on the Internet, which is a
much more appropriate place to get that sort of thing. (API stands for
application programming interface. In this chapter, API will mean the
software that we use to communicate with the rendering subsystem.)
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