- Author:
- Jim Blinn
From the Publisher: The third entry in the Jim Blinn's Corner series, this is, like the others, a handy compilation of selected installments of his influential column. But here, for the first time, you get the "Director's Cut" of the articles: revised, expanded, and enhanced versions of the originals. What's changed Improved mathematical notation, more diagrams, new solutions. What remains the same All the things you've come to rely on: straight answers, irreverent style, and innovative thinking. This is Jim Blinn at his bestnow even better. Highlights Features 21 expanded and updated installments of "Jim Blinn's Corner," dating from 1995 to 2001, and never before published in book form. Includes "deleted scenes"tangential explorations that didn't make it into the original columns. Details how Blinn represented planets in his famous JPL flyby animations. Explores a wide variety of other topics, from the concrete to the theoretical: assembly language optimization for parallel processors, exotic usage of C++ template instantiation, algebraic geometry, a graphical notation for tensor contraction, and his hopes for a future world. Author Biography: For over 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 flyby 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 is the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award as well as the SIGGRAPH Coons Award, and has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling. In 2000, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He currently works at Microsoft Research.
Cited By
Loop C and Blinn J Real-time GPU rendering of piecewise algebraic surfaces ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers, (664-670)- Blinn J (2006). How to Solve a Cubic Equation, Part 1, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 26:3, (84-93), Online publication date: 1-May-2006.
- Blinn J (2006). How to Solve a Cubic Equation, Part 2, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 26:4, (90-100), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2006.
- Loop C and Blinn J (2006). Real-time GPU rendering of piecewise algebraic surfaces, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 25:3, (664-670), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2006.
- Loop C and Blinn J Resolution independent curve rendering using programmable graphics hardware ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers, (1000-1009)
- Blinn J (2005). How to solve a Quadratic Equation, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 25:6, (76-79), Online publication date: 1-Nov-2005.
- Loop C and Blinn J (2005). Resolution independent curve rendering using programmable graphics hardware, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 24:3, (1000-1009), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2005.
Index Terms
- Jim Blinn's Corner: Notation, Notation, Notation
Recommendations
Remembering Jim
Designing games with a purposeBoth melancholy and reverential, the Jim Gray Tribute at the University of California at Berkeley honored one of computer science's leading pioneers and visionaries.
Jim Gray at Berkeley
Tribute to honor Jim GrayJim Gray spent a decade as a student and researcher at Berkeley. In action, he is remembered for his breadth, his depth, and his generosity.
Vladimir Botchev
This is a compilation of the latest papers (revised, and even augmented) by a very influential personality, Jim Blinn, on computer graphics. It contains 21 short chapters on topics including sphere drawing and rendering; bit representations of floating point numbers; the eternal warning for newcomers that a gamma corrected image should not be processed immediately by linear methods; methods for matrix calculation optimization; multimedia extensions (MMX) assembly; C++ techniques; and some fine mathematically inclined chapters. If you liked the author's two previous compilations [1,2], it is likely that you will enjoy this one. Thematically, this book is too disparate for someone seeking orderly progression through the field of computer graphics. It does have a drawback: you are on you own (or almost, since the appendix contains some prototype classes) in creating working code from Blinn's suggestions and tips. There is not even a Web link to where such code could be found, and it is not on the author's Web page. Perhaps it is more motivating and challenging that way, since the algorithms described are reasonably short. In contrast with many other technical books, Blinn's sense of humor actually helps here, and makes the reading enjoyable. Are all of the algorithms useful__?__ They are as useful as the ones in [3], at the least. In fact, Blinn's new book can be considered the best continuation of the wonderful traditions of the series. Online Computing Reviews Service
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