Real-Time Shading

The book "Real Time Shading" was co-authored with Marc Olano (who wrote the first Renderman-to-GPU compiler) , Wolfgang Heidrich (who showed how to store advanced surface material models in environment maps) and Michael McCool (who showed how to store advanced surface material models in texture maps).

Graphics processors have recently become programmable with an array of special purpose features. This book describes numerous tricks for coercing your graphics card to do advanced shading, details a variety of ways you can implement your shader, and even shows how to design your own shading language and compiler.

There are some very good books and manuals on programming the GPU using Cg, HLSL, RenderMonkey and other programming environments. This book works with all of these environments by focusing on fundamentals, algorithms and concepts instead of the mechanics of code. It collects our work on different aspects of accelerating different shading effects into a single self-contained volume making the ideas more approachable than the original technical papers.

Only $50 or so at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com

Errata

Phenomelogical should be phenomenological. (In graphics, we like to say "polygonization" instead of "polygonalization," so I suppose the same could apply to "phenomenological." But it really was a spelling mistake.)
p. 11: Table 1.1 omits the map "p : s -> c".
p. 53 the phrase "...are needed to represent a full sphere may be that..." should end as "...may mean that...".
p. 97 "Gnu Image Manipulation Program" should be "GNU Image Manipulation Program".
p. 175 "...can be braodly classified... " should have the word "broadly" and the sentence is also missing period at the end.

Thanks to UIUC student Andrew Wu for spotting these.