Game developers, scientists, engineers, and graphics professionals will find techniques in this book’s four usable sections:

I. Fundamentals: A concise introduction to the science of shading, lighting, and texturing, and the structure of modern graphics hardware.

II. Building Blocks for Shading: Describes algorithms and useful approximationsto the fundamental techniques. Documents usual (and unusual) uses of texture coordinates, image compositing, and environment maps.

III. High-Level Procedural Shading: Reviews all real-time shading languages and compilers available, as well as shading APIs.

IV. And Beyond: Considers future developments in shading hardware and their implications for real-time shading. AUTHORBIO: Marc Olano is currently at SGI (Silicon Graphics). He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.

John C. Hart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Wolfgang Heidrich is a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at The University of British Columbia.

Michael McCool is an Associate Professor in the Computer Graphics Lab within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.