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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Real-time shading / Marc Olano [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Computer graphics. 2. Real-time data processing. I. Olano, Marc.

T385 .R43413 2002
006.6 9--dc21

2002066286

06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedication

To Erin, who was done with the book long before I was.
M.O.

To Patty, Chelsea and Hannah.
J.C.H.

To G tz and Ingrid Heidrich.
W.H.

To Monique.
M.M.

Acknowledgments

Sometime around 1991, as part of a graduate research assistantship at UNC, I found myself rewriting some of the lighting code for Pixel-Planes 5. This involved SIMD array code quite similar in character to current vertex and fragment shaders. I came away with two insights: graphics machines had developed enough computational power to do all kinds of procedural shading (an insight shared by others on the Pixel-Planes project); and without a true high-level shading language, you needed superhuman effort to use it. Thus...