Foundations for Rendering and Shading

This week we will be considering some historic devlopments, approaches, and individuals related to rendering and shading along with basic concepts and mathematics useful for shading.

During our discussion of mathematics, we will touch on some of the important things to remember and practice. Anton Gerderlan has some great OpenGL resources on his page along with a great eBook and example source code that is excellent for practice. He also has made a nice little “cheat sheet” on some of the basic related math.

In preparation for our first shader project, read this fundamental paper which discusses what has become a basic material model for a wide variety of graphics applications over the years. We’ll be implementing this in a GLSL fragment shader.