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Reviewer: Mike A. Evans

This second edition of one of the classic books describing the techniques of computer graphics is almost a total rewrite of the original edition published in 1982. The book now contains information that describes computer graphics technology at the beginning of the 1990s. The new edition is necessary. Changes in graphics hardware, especially its falling cost, have dramatically changed the software required and the computer graphics applications possible. The primary purpose of the book is as a text in university courses. The exercises test various levels of understanding. The excellent bibliography, with references up to 1990, includes European and Japanese work and is a pointer to further reading. The index is comprehensive. The book is well written and can be read at various levels. An alternative use would be as a general reference in a commercial organization writing computer graphics applications; here it would be useful to applications programmers who need to understand the technology. The book is organized into a group of basic chapters, three more specialized sections on the user interface, model definition, and image synthesis, and a final group of advanced techniques to model objects varying from clothes to trees. An appendix reviews mathematics for computer graphics. The basic group consists of seven chapters. After a chapter introducing computer graphics and the fundamental issues in hardware, software, and applications, two chapters describe the use and implementation of a simple two-dimensional interactive graphics package. The fourth chapter introduces graphics hardware and explains how it is used in the two-dimensional operations of the graphics package. The following two chapters introduce transformations in two- and three-dimensional space, including matrix representations; the relationships between coordinate systems; and viewing in three dimensions. The final chapter in the group describes the use and implementation of a three-dimensional floating-point graphics package that is a simplified version of the PHIGS standard. The user interface section consists of three chapters that describe the current technology of interaction devices, the issues in writing applications and software to drive them, and current styles of writing interaction dialogues. The first chapter describes hardware and analyzes the interaction operations and fundamental building blocks available, such as pull-down menus. The second discusses dialogue design, putting these building blocks into complete user interfaces. The third chapter discusses the methodologies used to develop an interaction sequence and to implement it in software components such as window management systems. The model definition section consists of three chapters that extend the modeling techniques in the basic group to cover color, surface, and solid models. The first chapter introduces techniques for representing curves and surfaces, including faceted and parametric surfaces. The second introduces solid modeling techniques, including a comparison of the representations for particular applications. The third chapter introduces the concepts and principles of color and some rules for its effective use in computer graphics applications. The image synthesis part consists of four chapters that examine techniques to create realistic pictures that capture many of the effects of light interacting with real objects. The first chapter provides a high-level introduction, describes the building blocks, and discusses the causes of and cures for aliasing. The second chapter discusses algorithms to determine which surfaces of a model are visible to the viewer. The third chapter discusses algorithms for shading and illumination, including an extensive treatment of ray tracing. The final chapter in the group discusses manipulations of multiple images, such as filtering, and the storage of images, including image compression. The advanced techniques group consists of four chapters that give an overview of the state of the art in 1990, recognizing that it is changing rapidly. The first chapter describes the hardware architectures used in commercial and research machines, such as pipelining and parallelism. The second extends the two-dimensional algorithms described in the basic group to cover topics such as shipping and scan converting primitives, data structures for bitmap graphics, and page description languages. The third chapter examines techniques to permit the simple modeling and display of complex objects and phenomena such as fog or clouds. The final chapter in this group is an introduction to computer animation. The book is unusually well illustrated, with line drawings and 130 color plates. It contains virtually no typographical errors. The graphics packages described are available from the publishers to run on IBM PC, Macintosh, and UNIX workstations. The only prior knowledge required is sufficient programming background to read the Pascal program fragments and understand basic data structures and algorithms. The main difference between the first and second editions is that a vector graphics orientation is replaced by a raster orientation. This change results in the replacement of the original CORE-based graphics package with the two described above. Topics covered for the first time or in much more depth include user interface issues; solid, NURBS surface, and non-geometric models; rendering, anti-aliasing, and visible surface determination; illumination; advanced raster graphics architecture; and animation. The text sets out to be a standard reference on computer graphics. This excellent book certainly achieves its purpose. Computer graphics is now too wide a field for any individual to comprehend all the detail. This book combines four main and three guest authors to mitigate this problem. It is a large book, at 1200 pages nearly twice the size of the first edition, but its best feature is that it organizes the content to be manageable. Some topics are omitted, but they would have increased the size of the book. I would have liked a deeper discussion of raster-to-vector conversion; manipulation of scanned input documents; the use of CAD systems such as AutoCAD or CADDS as hosts for customized computer graphics applications; when to use NURBS; and the user interface to solid modeling . I would also have preferred the two-dimensional graphics package to be based on features of GKS rather than Quickdraw and Xlib 2D. These criticisms are minor when compared to the book's strengths, however. It is a comprehensive and readable reference to a vast subject. I was entertained and enlightened, and I thoroughly recommend this text.