[Andrew_S_Glassner]Morphs, mallards, and montages computer-aided imagination(pdf){Zzzzz}

This book is for everyone who's interested in computer graphics and how it can take us on exciting journeys powered by imagination and a love of discovery and invention. Each chapter investigates a unique topic and gives you the tools to continue that exploration on your own. Examine the possibilities of: - Pop-up books and cards - Reconstructing shredded documents - Crop circles - Weaves and Tartans - Morphing images and much more! Browse and enjoy the array of visual ideas or roll up your sleeves and write your own code.

Product Description
About the Author

Dr. Andrew Glassner Glassner created and edited the "Graphics Gems" series and the book "An Introduction to Ray Tracing". He is also the author of the two-volume text "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis". Glassner has written a regular column for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications since 1996. Those columns have been collected in three books, "Andrew Glassner's Notebook", "Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook", and "Morphs, Mallards, and Montages."

Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press (23 September 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1568812310
ISBN-13: 978-1568812311

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Not just about computer graphics, but also about the power of imagination 7 June 2006
By calvinnme -
I don't know why Glassner's notebook series hasn't been more popular. It could be because he doesn't just lay out code for this or that computer graphics effect. Instead, his books are often about the ideas and imagination behind various aspects of computer graphics. I really enjoyed this 3rd installment in his notebook series. As no table of contents is shown, I review this book in the context of its table of contents.
1 DESIGNING AND BUILDING POP-UP CARDS
This is about how to build a system to create your own pop-up cards. These things are fun to make, but they're notoriously difficult to design. This column gives the basics of the essential geometry. The idea is not to create cards to be viewed on the computer, but rather to use the computer to help create real paper cards. Glassner also talks about how to actually build a computer-based Pop-Up Card Design Assistant.
2 RECONSTRUCTING SHREDDED DOCUMENTS
This is about a court case in which one woman showed up in a Senate hearing with several big boxes of strips of paper that had been shredded using conventional shredding machines. This article discusses how to build a computer-based system that is fast and accurate enough to reassemble a big box of shredded documents in just a few minutes.
3 DUCKS AND WAVES
This article is about the V-shaped waves that form behind a fast-moving body on deep water. Glassner shows how to compute these waves for objects moving both along straight and curved paths, and also show how one can create a five-pointed star with them.
4 CURIOUS PICTURES
This article discusses different ways to create an interesting "approximate" version of a nice "starting image". You might want to do this to add visual interest or complexity to a scene, or to use as source material for an interesting transition. It discusses how you might create a version of a starting image using circles, half-circles, triangles, boxes, meshes, and even Voronoi diagrams. The whole thing was driven by a simple adaptive refinement algorithm.
5 DIGITAL WEAVING AND BUILDING A DIGITAL LOOM
Glassner talk about the basic idea behind how looms work, and how to read a weaver's draft. He also discusses The Weaving Equation, which is a nice little way to wrap up what's happening in a draft into a compact mathematical expression. By making a few additional definitions, the equation can be simplified into a couple of quick table lookups and a single logical AND operation. This article then introduces and discusses Andrew's Weaving Language. This is a compact notation for describing weaves that can otherwise take many numbers to specify. Glassner also describes his digital loom, and how to program your own.
6 IMAGE SEARCH AND REPLACE
This is a technique that does for pictures what traditional search-and-replace functions do for text documents. You tell the system what to look for, and what you'd like to replace it with. It finds the targets, removes them, cleans up the background, and then puts in the new images transformed appropriately so that they look good. The tricks are finding an efficient way to search and then using modern texture-synthesis algorithms to fill in the holes after a piece has been removed.
7 VENN DIAGRAMS FOR LOTS OF VARIABLES
This article discusses the generalization of Venn diagrams beyond the standard three-circle form. In this column Glassner discusses what other people have done, and gives his own technique for drawing these types of diagrams for large numbers of variables.
8 METAMORPHOSIS IN 3D
This article discusses an algorithm for smoothly blending one convex polyhedron to another by refining Glassner's earlier metamorphosis technique. The basic idea is to take the planes that define the start and end shapes, move them all simulaneously, and then find the volume they define as their interior at each moment along the transition. It's really easy and fast to program, and the results look great because they're smooth and continuous.
9 EVERYDAY COMPUTER GRAPHICS
Glassner discusses some of the ways that our lives could be improved when we have handy display devices at our disposal, and smart computers around us all the time that can remember where we put things, where we've been, and can talk to other computers to help us find friends and directions.
10 FONTS FONTS FONTS!
This describes a system that Glassner built to help sort through thousands of typefaces on a computer. You can choose values for a half-dozen different criteria such as density, border length, aspect ratio, and the degree of match between the capital E and F character.
11 SPIROGRAPH UNLEASHED
This looks into the possibility of replacing the circles that are part of every Spirograph toy with more interesting curves. Specifically, Glassner builds wheels and frames out of Bezier curves, and then rolls the wheel around the frame. This generalizes a class of mathematical curves known as roulettes.
12 THE GEOMETRY OF CROP CIRCLES
This is about the fascinating qualities of crop formations. Glassner describes the basic geometry behind most crop patterns, and provides clear descriptions and proofs of the often mentioned "Hawkins' Theorems," including the elusive Fifth Theorem. Glassner introduces his Crop language for creating crop circle designs.
These 12 articles were written between the years 2002 and 2004 and based on articles that Glassner wrote for the magazine "IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications". I really found them fascinating and an inspiration for a few computer graphics ideas of my own. This is not a traditional computer graphics book though. It is more about combining the power of imagination, the computer, and every-day observations into interesting graphical ideas. I highly recommend it.