Reddit reviews Fundamentals of Computer Graphics
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Used Book in Good Condition
Some other people here can probably give you a better answer...But anyways...
Honestly you aren't "new" to computer programming if you've done some Java. I think the best route will be to learn about computer graphics by playing around with OpenGl and all the minor details of C++ you can pick up as you go. (OpenGL is written in C).
As a source this book is a standard university textbook on computer graphics. Don't get the newer edition just get the older edition(linked in previous sentence). You won't learn C++ or OpenGL but the theory behind computer graphics. If you want to get a deeper understanding of OpenGL and have a very good reference by you then consider getting "OpenGL Programming Guide". You could borrow it form a library and return it if you decide it is not for you.
Here is a course taught by Stanford on computer graphics. They are probably one of the top universities when it comes to research in computer graphics and they are involved heavily with some of the largest animation companies such as Pixar. In this course they also cover basic OpenGL.
Here is another course which is more theory and less biased when it comes to a graphics library such as OpenGL (meaning expect to not learn OpenGL but the theory behind computer graphics in this course).
I am assuming by "MechE" you mean mechanical engineer. If so I think you be well positioned because a lot of the mathematics (differential equations, linear algebra, calculus, etc...) you will have a very good understand of which will be really helpful.
Good luck!
EDIT: Correction the lecture series above is from UCBerkley
EDIT: OpenGL is written in C
To add to that... you're definitely going to want to make sure your math skills are up to par. Linear Algebra, calculas, stats... The first is probably the absolute most important (everything about display, rendering, etc... is derived from concepts in Linear Algebra really), and the other two help in making things more efficient, faster, or emulating complex objects/systems.
The book Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley is, in my opinion, an absolutely fantastic book on the subject. It does a fantastic job of building your fundamentals before diving into deeper and more interesting topics. It's basically what I used to do things like learning how to make a raytracer, renderer, etc... from scratch. Lots of fun :)
Looking at the course posted by jbos, it looks very similar to one I did in University myself. So it'd probably be a great start.
Shirley's Fundamentals of Computer Graphics is a good textbook.
Pharr's Physically Based Rendering goes more deeply into the fundamentals.
Im in the same boat as you but I have paddled for sometime, here is the books that are awesome to work with:
2)3D Math Primer For Graphics And Game Development
3)Fundamentals of Computer Graphics
these 3 books will come very handy when you start computer graphics...the main one is the Interactive Computer Graphics book, written by Edward Angel, Dave Shreiner, Dave Shreiner is an awesome guy and he is also one of the authors of OpenGL programming guide.
with that being said these books dont teach OpenGL, they teach Graphics, and all these books are advance, because let's face it 3D & graphics in general are hard topics..
Interactive Computer Graphics takes a nice approach to both the math and the concepts, it also introduces the basics of modern OpenGL using shaders, the problem about it for me is its a bit hard to get the math, because it assumes that you got linear algebra down but it has some appendices with it that explain some math but nowhere near enough.
The other two books unfortunately I havent been able to get into but they are very recommended by people around the web.
So if you can read all three at the same time...they will help in every way.
if you need more help or want to know how far I have come, then by all means shoot me a PM..or I will shoot you one.
> Can you give me any more info on what types of things you simulate
There are so many different things. One example that involves physical simulation is rendering. Rendering, turning a 3d description of a scene into a 2d image, is all about simulating the pysics of light transport. Given a set of lights and surfaces you simulate how light bounces around and what a virtual observer placed somewhere in the scene would see. Another example is explosions. Cool/realistic looking explosions for movies involve simulating burning materials, fluid/gas movement, sound propagation, fracture, plastic/non-plastic deformation, the list goes on and on.
Here are some books that might get you started in the right direction
As for programming languages, you're definitely going to need to learn C/C++. Graphics applications are very resource initensive, so it's important to use a fast language. You'll probably also want to learn a couple of scripting languages like python or perl. You'll also need to learn some graphics API's like OpenGL or DirectX if you're on Windows.
I hope this helped!
I find myself attracted to CG part. Not only the Unity part but whole science behind it intrigues me a lot. Here are some resources that helped me a lot for a better understanding on the topic:
Here are some tutorials on various topics that may interest you:
These are the ones that i remember right now :) hope you will find them useful
I used Shirley's classic Tiger book in my first CG class: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Peter-Shirley/dp/1568814690
But it's definitely there to teach theory, not really provide code. it was more of a side resource alongside custom C++ projects my professor made.
Are your students not expected to know C++ (or at least C) before coming into your class? If not that may make finding resources hard since so many CG books use c++ code and throw OpenGL right at you. Assuming they don't, it may be best to try and follow the approach the Udactiy course does: prepare some boilerplate demos in JS (possibly using a framework like Three.js like the course does) or another language/framework of choice, use the textbook more for optional mathematical/theory references outside of class, and have the projects be based around implementing features within your boilerplate. Even in my OpenGL course the professor provided a bit of structure so we weren't bogged down setting up buffers and other handles.
"Principles and Practices" is ancient, though as defrost says, the basics haven't changed much. But anything to do with interactive graphics has changed massively, so it's useless for that. The good news is that they're working on a new edition (I reviewed two chapters for Spike Hughes), but its release won't be for a good long while, I think.
I definitely wouldn't recommend the Schneider and Eberly book (not sure why people forget Schneider, Phil's a good guy) - that's really a reference.
Here's our own recommended book list for computer graphics. Our focus is on interactive graphics, so something like Angel's book works for that area. For a more general text, which sounds like what you want, I'd consider Fundamentals of Computer Graphics.
From the other thread, I should check out Frank Luna's book, but again that one's focused on interactive computer graphics and so won't include ray tracing or other global illumination techniques.
Oh, I also don't recommend our book, as it's meant as a second book on interactive graphics, not a first.
part of being a scientist is reviewing a wide range of references - you might be expecting a bit much from one online source. let me suggest this one and this one, and especially this one are going to have the general graphics pipeline explanation chapters that you're looking for. if $$$ is a problem (and it is for most of us with these texts), perhaps you can insist that your local library gets them?
you can also pick up some good ideas by visiting course pages for some of the more well-known university graphics programmes - some of them have slides online, otherwise check out their reading lists - these guys are the best in the world at teaching graphics. read what they read.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs465/2007fa/
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/
http://www.cs.utah.edu/research/areas/graphics/
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~badler/courses/cis560.html
but i suspect, your best bet for this sort of stuff is actually Eric Haines' online course, which has a free version. it uses webgl but the main concepts are exactly the same as desktop gl and it's really very good https://www.udacity.com/course/cs291
also, interesting side note - Myers-Briggs has been widely discredited. it's actually based on Jung's germanic mysticism, which comes from ancient European magic. earth/air/wind/fire, alchemy, the four humours, the four personality components etc. etc. not a drop of science in it, but employers insist on you doing it.
From the 70s? Hell, they still do this today. Here's irony for you: http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computer-Graphics-Peter-Shirley/dp/1568814690
This book has color plates in the middle still. It's embarrassing.
Before jumping into ray tracing, and then PBRT, I learned computer graphics with this book: Fundamentals of Computer Graphics (Shirley, et. al, 2009)
This book covers all the essential parts of computer graphics, and raytracing is just one part of it.
Maybe there I was a little unclear with the term "fully understand".
If I read a well documented C++ header-file, I'd say "I fully understand that function now" even though I've never looked at the actual implementation. To me "fully understanding" some code or a software feature (at least on a user level) just means that I know what it does, not how it does it.
I am aware, that there are a lot of great resources on how shaders and computer graphics work in general, like Wikipedia or this book (that's actually sitting on my shelf right now). However every implementation of these general techniques has it's custom behaviour, unique quirks and exceptions. So you're right in stating, that I'm looking for an encyclopedia (that'd be perfect tbh) but one on Blender, not on computer graphics in general.
Right now I just want to competently use Blender's material system, without having to read through their actual source code. I mean just imagine, instead of having decent documentation, people would expect you to read through the implementation of every piece of code and software you'd like to use. If that was the case, no sane person would use operating systems ("Hey, how do I mount a hard-drive in Linux?" -- "It's all open source, just read the code, dude."; sounds weird, right?).
Btw. I mixed something up. I actually have never used HLSL, I used OpenGL. No idea how I could confuse those two...