Andrew Glassner's Computer Graphics Page

Graphics Gems I

I originally conceived of Graphics Gems as a "little pocket reference." The cover was by Thad Beier, then of PDI. I can't make heads or tails out of the cover of the Chinese translation; it's some kind of wild pop art. Read more, or see it on Amazon. Also get source code and errata from http://www.graphicsgems.org.

My first work in 3D computer graphics
was on a Tektronix 4014 storage tube in 1976.
We've come a long way since then! These pages
document some of my research work, my books,
my journal activities, and my columns.

research - books - journals - columns

I'm interested in finding ways to use the computer to help people do creative work in computer graphics. This ends up taking me into the three big fields of rendering, modeling, and animation. Here are summaries of some of my major projects from the last few years. You can find more information on any of project by selecting the icon. I tend to publish most of my new ideas these days in my columns.

Shape Synthesis

Sound synthesizers opened up a new way to think about sounds. The Shape Synthesizer adapts the ideas behind these powerful instruments to create three-dimensional models and shapes that are not in the CAD tradition. Read more.

Cubism for Computer Graphics

Computer graphics lets us put cameras anywhere we want. I've looked into how to create tools to let us use wild cameras in new ways for storytelling. The approach shares in spirit some of the ideas in the art technique known as cubism. Read more.

Crop

Crop circles are a fascinating phenomenon in many ways, from sociology and technology to public relations and art. Most crop formations can be described using techniques of classical geometric construction. I've created a small computer language called Crop designed to help describe and construct crop formations. Read more.

Geometric Substitutions

This is a novel modeling technique for creating complex, interesting three-dimensional structures based on simple starting forms and transformation rules. Read more.

Fluorescence and Phosphorescence

The hands on our watches glow in the dark, and some posters look cool under a black light because of these phenomena. I've developed a computational model of the physics appropriate for image synthesis. Read more.

Device-Directed Rendering

Often the colors computed in a synthetic image cannot be displayed by a specific device, which means the image must be distorted. Device-Directed Rendering automatically produces accurate pictures for any device. Read more.

Pop-Up Card Design

Pop-up cards are fun to make and receive, but can be difficult to design. I've worked out the geometry for the most popular types of pop-ups, and written an interactive design program for creating many styles of pop-up cards. Read more.

Dynamic Stratification

When rendering a picture with ray tracing, every sample is precious. The method of dynamic stratification is a technique for increasing the value of every sample.
Read more.

Shape Metamorphosis

Shape transformation is very cool. It's fun to see one 3D shape turning itself into another. This automatic technique is fast and works great for convex objects, and gives an artist a good head-start for other shapes. It also includes a general algorithm for smoothly turning any shape into its convex hull.
Read more.

Spectrum

Experimenting with image synthesis algorithms requires a stable rendering system that is flexible and extendable. The Spectrum architecture specifies such a system.
Read more.

Lightning and Thunder

Building on the work of atmospheric scientists, I've developed a statistical model of lightning which can be controlled by a designer. Then I compute the thunder that a listener would hear due to that specific lightning bolt. Read more.

Space Subdivision for Fast Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is a technique for creating images. It's easy to understand and implement. It's also very slow. This paper presented an algorithm for speeding things up significantly. Read more.

Spacetime Ray Tracing

To make ray-traced movies, I show how to build a four-dimensional spacetime structure that lets us trace rays through the entire animation at once, resulting in a much faster rendering process with no loss in the quality of the images. Read more.

Adaptive Precision in Texture Mapping

Texture mapping is an important graphics technique. This paper presents an adaptive, iterative method for computing texture values for pixels with shapes that aren't exactly square or rectangular. Read more.

My interests in books comes from two sources: a love of language and writing, and a sense of community. I like to write both for technical and non-technical audiences, and have written books and articles for both.

Interactive Storytelling
			Interactive fiction is an exciting new field that will be born when computers, communications, and storytelling merge. Many different approaches have been investigated in an effort to find out what "interactive fiction" might really mean, but none of these experiments have yet acheived mainstream success. In this book I discuss how I see the field, and the most important aspects of storytelling and gaming that will inform our future progress. Read more or see it on Amazon.

Andrew Glassner's Third Notebook
			This is my third collection of columns. It's directed to hobbyists and anyone else interested in computer graphics and interesting applications and ideas relating to the field. This collects and expands upon the most recent three years of my columns for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. The book is being published by AK Peters, and will be available in the summer of 2004. Read more.

Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook
			This is my second collection of columns. It's directed to hobbyists and anyone else interested in computer graphics and interesting applications and ideas relating to the field. This collects and expands upon the more recent three years of my columns for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. Read more, or see it on Amazon.

Andrew Glassner's Notebook
			This book is directed to hobbyists and anyone else interested in computer graphics and interesting applications and ideas relating to the field. This collects and expands upon the first three years of my columns for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. Read more, or see it on Amazon.

Principles of Digital Image Synthesis
					I believe that computer graphics rendering is woven together from three fields: human perception, digital signal processing, and the physics of light. This two-volume set brings these ideas together in a single, unified presentation that covers the theory and practice of rendering. Read more, or see it on Amazon.

Graphics Gems Series
							Before we knew it, Gems had turned into a series! Thad made the cover for Gems II. The cover for volume III was made by the VALIS group using an early version of RenderMan. Volume IV's cover was by Eben Ostby of Pixar. I don't know where the Gems V cover came from, but I never approved it! The series ended with Volume V; as the Series Editor I decided that we'd accomplished what we set out to do and it was time to stop while we were ahead. You can download the source for all the code in the books, as well as errata, from http://www.graphicsgems.org. Read more, or see Gems II, Gems III, Gems IV, and Gems V on Amazon.

An Introduction to Ray Tracing
			Ray tracing is an image synthesis technique that is simple, fast, and fun to use. This book covers a lot of the fundamental ideas that are useful to those starting out in the field, or are thinking of writing their own ray tracer. Read more, or see it on Amazon.

Computer Graphics for Artists and Designers
					My second book was a top-to-bottom rewrite of my first. The book was very popular in its day; it's still used in some design and art classes. The Japanese translation has a nice abstract for a cover. Read more, or see it on Amazon.

I like working on journals. Getting good papers contributed to journals, and making sure they're reviewed quickly and fairly is very important to the progress of our field.

Journal of Graphics Tools

When we ended the Graphics Gems series, it was clear that there was a place in the world for a journal of small but useful graphics articles. With publishers AK Peters we founded the Journal of Graphics Tools. Here's an image of the cover of Volume 1, Number 1, back in 1996. We're still going strong!

IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications

I was a member of the editorial board for CG&A for several years. Eventually I decided I could do more by focusing on my regular column, described below.

ACM Transactions on Graphics

This quarterly journal, affectionately known as TOG, is the pre-eminent journal for publishing scholarly articles on computer graphics. I was a member of the editorial board for several years, and Editor-In-Chief from 1995 to 1997.

ACM SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics) refers both to an organization, and the big annual conference it sponsors every year. This is the premier conference publication in our field. I was Papers Chair in 1994, which is also when I invented the Sketches venue for informal presentations. Here's the cover of the 1994 conference proceedings.

I've been writing a regular column called Andrew Glassner's Notebook for the magazine IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications since January 1996. I range pretty far and wide in my topics, but they all relate somehow to computer graphics. You can read summaries of all the columns, plus some additional notes and errata on my column pages.

The first three years of those columns have been collected, revised, and expanded in a book, Andrew Glassner's Notebook. The most recent three years have been collected in a new book, Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook.