Reading Along

Along with the first math assignment, you should have completed reading chapters 1 and 2 in Real-Time Rendering (and if you have Advanced Global Illumination, yet, chapters 1 through 2.2). In addition to that, if you would like a little more coverage regaring transformations than what we have discussed in class so far, chapter 4 in Real-Time Rendering gives a nice overview. Section 4.1 primarily covers what you would find most useful for this course, but the other sections of the chapter provide additional insight into rotations and representing orientation in different useful manners for graphics and game programming.

As you finish your work developing your fragment shader for the Blinn-Phong assignment, read chapter 3 in Real-Time Rendering which covers the basics of Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) design for programmable pipelines and reveals a bit more practical detail about GPU pipelines versus the general discussion in chapter 2. This information will be useful in framing thoughts about how one should code programmable shaders versus typical Von-Neumann-architecture, serially CPU-executed code. Taking generalizations about GPU architecture in mind helps develop code that works better for the specific type of parallelism that GPUs provide. It is not as necessary for the Blinn-Phong exercise, but will apply more to developing shaders for the following assignment.