Acknowledgments
Few books happen overnight; the one you’re about to read has been almost 20 years in the making. As you might suspect, many people have been part of its story, in one way or another, and I want to thank them. In chronological order:
- Omar Paganini and Ernesto Ocampo Edye
As the Dean of the School of Engineering and the Director of Computer Science at Universidad Católica del Uruguay, they put considerable trust in me by letting me take the reins of Computer Graphics when I was but a fourth-year student, and by letting me completely reshape its curriculum in the way I thought best. Fellow professor Roberto Lublinerman was a great mentor throughout my first year of teaching.
- My students from 2003 to 2008
Besides being the unwitting guinea pigs of my continuously evolving teaching methodology, they accepted and respected a professor barely a year older than them (and, in some cases, younger than them). The joy in their faces when they created their first raytraced images made it all worth it.
- Alejandro Segovia Azapian
A student turned teaching assistant turned friend, his input has helped me evolve the material over time; having been a tiny part of his subsequent, very successful professional career specialized in realtime rendering and performance optimization fills me with pride. He was also a technical reviewer of this book, and his contributions ranged from fixing typos to suggesting deep structural improvements of some chapters.
- JC Van Winkel
He did his own editing pass and came up with a lot of valuable suggestions for improvement.
- The readers of Hacker News
My lecture notes, diagrams, and demos made the front page of Hacker News, and attracted considerable attention—including that of No Starch Press. If this hadn’t happened, this book might have never existed.
- Bill Pollock, Alex Freed, Kassie Andreadis, and the entire No Starch Press team
They guided me through cleaning up and reshaping my lecture notes and diagrams, which in my mind were essentially ready to be published as a book, into an actual book. They took the raw materials to a whole new level; I had no idea this took so much work and effort, and Alex, Kassie, and the team did a stellar job. My name is the only one on the cover, but make no mistake, this was a group effort.