ShaderX5: Advanced Rendering Techniques (Shaderx) | 
 enlarge | Author: Wolfgang Engel
Publisher: Charles River Media
Category: Book
List Price: $59.95
Buy New: $36.67
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New (27) Used (9) from $28.02
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 259614
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 624
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 7.7 x 1.7
ISBN: 1584504994
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.693
EAN: 9781584504993
ASIN: 1584504994
Publication Date: December 14, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: T20080926064327P
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Product Description
Shader X5 Advanced Rendering Techniques is the newest volume in this cutting-edge, indispensable series for game and graphics programmers. This all new volume is packed with articles covering state-of-the-art shader techniques and tools written by programming professionals from around the world. These authors have a wealth of knowledge and experience in the field, and each section is edited by an industry expert to ensure the highest quality and usefulness! The collection is broken into nine comprehensive sections. The geometry section covers improved N-Patches, how to generate dynamic wrinkles on animated meshes and much more. In the rendering section you'll discover how to generate a tangent space ordinate system in the pixel shader, how to setup an area light for games, and a variety of other techniques. Practical and useful multi-frustum shadow maps like Cascaded Shadow Maps and Queried Virtual Shadow maps are covered in the shadow section. The environmental techniques section features the beautiful volume particle approaches: Rain and Godrays under water. The global illumination section covers techniques that should work in next-gen games. The new mobile section lays out the basics of shader driven next-gen mobile development and some advanced effects tailored to the devices. Many shader-relevant engine design decisions are covered in the 3D Engine Design section. It also deals with post-processing effects, how to design shader plugins, and how to bind shader data. The Beyond Pixels and Triangles section covers a printf for the pixel shader, random number generator on the GPU, and many more.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Good series May 13, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Its hard for me to treat the books of this series separately (ShaderX 3, ShaderX 4, ShaderX 5). They are all very good books of GPU-Gems level or higher. In comparison with GPU Gems, they are more academic, i. e. they are rather short and more applicable to wide range of applications then GPU Gems ones (while GPU Gems series is more scientific, state of the art, considering one particular research) and the accompanying CD is much more better (lots of working examples, most with source code).
Sections (Image-Space, Shadows) are also very helpful to figure out what is useful for you.
This series is not for beginners anyway, so please, go Cg Tutorial or DX SDK Tutorial and don't put 2 or 3 marks for these books because you can't cope with them.
 current topics for rendering April 23, 2007
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
For the serious graphics programmer (as opposed to the hilarious programmer), Engel's collection of papers offers a grab bag of new ideas and implementations. Not a casual read. It presupposes a reasonable maths background in trigonometry and multivariate calculus.
One topic example is how to deal with multiple light sources illuminating a scene. Brute force ray tracing might be ok for static images. But for real time contexts, it can be too slow. So deferred shading is described in one chapter. It has previously known problems, like too much memory allocations and aliasing. The chapter offers ways to get around these and other issues.
Another chapter talks about tangent frames. Reads like an application of classical analysis in 3d space. It deals with finding the normal mapping at a surface point. Where the novelty is that tangents need not be precomputed. Which reduces some storage requirements. What is interesting is how traditional texts on multidimensional calculus talked about things like tangent planes. But they rarely went into optimising calculations based on that analysis. Whereas graphics programmers have to actually continually crank up the performance of such methods.
There is a lot more in the text, of course.
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