Books

The "book" for this class will be a reader of papers.

This year, a lot of those readings will come from a preprint version of an animation textbook written by Rick Parent. We will be "beta-testing" this book. Comments on how it will be distributed will come soon.

I will ask everyone to read some of a film book for part of the class. I suggest that you purchase one, and asked to bookstore to get copies of some of my favorites. I recommend that you come to class first to hear about them.

There are many books you might want to use for the class. I list some of them here. This list is by no means complete.

Books Discussing Software You May Use

The Renderman Companion. by Steve Upstill. Published by Addison Wesly. (should be available from the UW Bookstore, borders, or any decent technical bookstore)

I recommend the Renderman Companion not because its the reference to Renderman (which you may or may not want to use in the course), but because its worth having as a good general graphics reference. In terms of a reference for how to write programs that talk to Renderman, I actually think you're better off using the RIB file format document, and other online documentation.

Learning Maya 1.0 for Windows NT. Available from Journey Educational Marketing.

I do notrecommend spending $50 for the tutorial manual for a piece of software.On the other hand, it's hard to imagine learning Maya without some kind of book. This book is (more or less) on line in the Maya directory in html format. There are copies of this book around, and I will try to make them available. Should you decide you need your own copy, you can order it from Journey.

Any number of books at the bookstore about 3D Studio MAX.

There are lots of books about using MAX, all aimed at animators. You have to flip through them to decide which ones you don't hare.

Opengl Programming Guide : The Official Guide to Learning Opengl, Version 1.X by Mason Woo (Contributor), Jackie Neider, Tom Davis,

This is the reference for the graphics library that you are likely to use. For better or worse, OpenGL seems to be the standard that everyone uses these days. Be sure to get the most current version.

General Graphics Texts

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. By Foley, Van Damn, Feiner and Hughes. Addison Wesly.

This is "the classic" textbook on computer graphics. I cite it not because its the best, but because everyone else has used it and refers to it, so if you're going to be a graphics researcher, you might want to have it around.

Image Processing for Computer Graphics. By Gomez and Velho.

A more focussed book on an important area of graphics. Its a bit mathematical, but it covers lots of important topics that are not well covered by more traditional books.

Film Books

Some knowledge of filmmaking (such as cinematography, editing, direction, lighting, ...) is extremely useful for making animation.

Here are books that I have liked to look at. Since I'm not a professional filmmaker, I'm not sure their the greatest from the film point of view. For the class, you will be expected to read some of one of these, but not enough to warrant buying the book (unless you decide you want to have a copy for yourself). Notice that the names of the first two books are very similar.

Shot by Shot; A Practical Guide to Filmmaking by John Cantine, Brady Lewis, Susan Howard

This little book is targetted at a very basic filmmaking course. In fact, the way I learned about it was from taking an intro film class at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which used a predeccessor to this book (a photocopies bunch of typed notes). On one hand, this book is very basic, since it gets down to the nuts and bolts of filmmaking (how to turn on the camera), but it does give a very concise overview of the basic ideas of all aspects of filmmaking. If you want a copy, you'll have to buy it through Pittsburgh Filmmakers (www.pghfilmmakers.org).

Film Directing Shot by Shot : Visualizing from Concept to Screen by Steven D. Katz .

This is a pretty comprehensive book on cinematography and editing. I get the feeling that this book is something a professional filmmaker would use to learn about their craft. The book includes lots of examples. It also has a nice emphasis on storyboarding and preplanning. The second volume of the set is interesting because it consists entirely of examples, many from famous movies. This book is more than you need to know for this class, but if you have any interest in filmmaking, or in using the craft of filmmaking for computer animation, I highly recommend it. It's the kind of book you keep coming back to. If you can't find it locally, you can get it mail order.

Film Art. by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.

This is a textbook for a comprehensive book on film. It is less technical than the others (because its more about film history and criticism). However, it does survey all of the technique of filmmaking. It's a nice book, and its written by UW authors!

Classic Animation References

The Illusion of Life : Disney Animation. by Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston

This is a "coffee table book" full of Disney Art. It's basically a history book describing the process of making all the original Disney films. However, there is a chapter where they discuss the Disney "Principles of Animation" which is the reference on the "animated style." The early animated work at Disney is really important in the development of animation. So while looking at lots of pictures of Snow White, etc.may not seem like something to do in a grad CS class, you can learn a lot about animation and character design from it. For a while, this book was out of print. Fortunately, there's a new edition.

Animated Cartoons: How they are made, their origin and development. E. G. Lutz.

This is a 1920 book on animation that is neat because it predates the "modern art" of animation. There is a modern reprint available from Applewood Books.

Computer Animation Books

If you go to the bookstore, there are zillions of books on computer animation. Generally, these are targetted at animators, not at computer scientists, and are specific to a specific software package and assume that you know little about computers. Some are better than others. Unfortunately, I haven't really gone through all that many. Some of the example-laden, package specific books actually turn out to be intesting because their full of examples with tricks on how to get results out of the tools, which sometimes can inspire you to think about how the tools work, or how they should work to make things better for a user.

Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games. By Alberto Menache.

I would assign this book as a reading if it didn't cost $50. It's a great introduction to the nuts and bolts of doing motion capture. (e.g. how to place makers, how to compute skelletons from markers, ...).

Books on Windows Programming

You may find yourself needing to write a program under Windows NT or 95 or 98, if not for this class, then someday. Basically, windows programming is not that bad because the tools shield you from the horrors of the questionably designed windowing system.

Inside Visual C++ by David Kruglinski

The best way to learn how to write a Windows program is to read through a book on the subject and try the examples. The best way to find a book is to ask someone who you know is a good Windows programmer, and find out what they recommend. I am not a good Windows programmer, but this is the book that several people suggested to me.

OpenGL Programming for Windows 95 and NT by Glenn Fosner

The main thing this book is useful for is getting started with doing OpenGL under Windows. Once you've gotten started, its unclear how useful this book will be.

Numerical References

Numerical Recipes in C (2nd edition) by Press, Teukolsky, Vettering, and Flannery

"Real" numerical analysts seem to hate this book. It may not have the best algorithms, the most rigorous theory, or highly optimized implementations, but it does provide lots of insights as to what algorithms work and why. The book is very helpful for getting the intuitions required to do numerical programming. This is an incredibly handy reference.
Amazingly, they have put the whole book on-line!

 

 Last modified: 20:10 Jan 24, 2000