A Textbook (and the lack thereof)

There is no required textbook for this class. Generally, we’ll learn things from the “original sources” (papers, web pages, …).

A textbook is a good way to learn the really basic stuff that the fancier things (that you encounter in research papers). For some of this stuff, you could go back and look at really old papers (when what is now basic was the fancier stuff) – and we’ll do a lot of that. However, research papers (especially old ones) aren’t always the best ways to learn things.

The problem is, there really isn’t a textbook that covers the right set of things for this course. The closest that I know of is:

Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques, 3rd Edition. by Rick Parent. Morgan Kaufman, 2012. (amazon) I think this is, overall, a good book. Rick has a great historical perspective (he was a founder of the field), and he touches on a really broad range of topics. It has some nice reviews of the basic graphics stuff from a perspective of what you need for animation. However, I think for most of the advanced topics, the coverage is either too historical or too cursory for this to be an effective book for our class.

I will place a copy of this book on reserve at Wendt library (unfortunately, we do not have online access to this book).

We will use a chapter or two of this book for class. This is a small enough amount that I can’t justifying asking you to buy the book, but can provide you with scans under “academic fair use.”

However, if you like what you see, you might want to buy a copy. It’s especially useful as a reference for basic graphics stuff like curves and transforms.