Ben Cloward - Technical Artist | Book Recommendations

BEN CLOWARD - Technical Artist

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

I've had a lot of people ask me how I learned to create shaders and how they can learn more. A lot of what I know I learned from the books on this page, so these are the books I recommend for learning to write shaders.

My Favorites Shader Books!

The Cg Tutorial - by Randima Fernando & Mark J. Kilgard

This is the original - the book that got me into creating shaders! It covers all of the basics of the Cg language (almost exactly like HLSL) and is a great place to start learning.

The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide - by Sebastien St-Laurent

This amazing book sits on my desk and I refer to it almost every day. It explains everything about HLSL and includes some really nice appendices that cover all of the details of the language.

Advanced Lighting and Materials With Shaders border=

Advanced Lighting and Materials With Shaders
- by Kelly Dempski & Emmanuel Viale

This one has a heavy focus on lighting in the shader, including how to code direcitonal and point lights, and the math behind various lighting models like Blinn-Phong, Oren-Nayar, Minnaert, and Ward. I used this book as reference when I was writing the code for the original ShaderFX plugin.

Shaders for Game Artists and Programmers
- by Sebastien St-Laurent

I read this one a lot! I really like it because it talks about writing shader code in easy terms that most artists can understand. It covers a lot of really cool effects like full-screen filters, advanced lighting, shadow mapping, etc.

Breaking Into The Industry

Becoming a Video Game Artist - by John Pearl

I was a contributor on this one! It has interviews with industry veterans and covers just about everything you need to know to become an artist in the video game industry from portfolio tips, to interview strategies and including tips on what to study and focus on in school.

Lighting

If you're interested in Lighting - creating high dynamic range textures and how to realistically light a CG scene, check these books out!

Digital Lighting and Rendering - by Jeremy Birn

This book covers cool techniques for lighting scenes in CG from an artist's perspective. Topics include exposure, shadows, color, composition, materials, and compositing. The author - Jeremy Birn - is an industry veteran and very respected.

High Dynamic Range Imaging: Acquisition, Display, and Image-Based Lighting
- by Eric Reinhard, Greg Ward, Sumanta Pattanaik, & Paul Debevec

This is a master work - a foundational book written by pioneers in computer graphics - the guys that invented high dynamic range imaging. The book describes techniques for capturing, editing, and using high dynamic range images for creating realistic lighting and reflections.

Math

Shaders use a crazy amount of math! These books will teach you everything you need. The great thing about these books is that they're specificly focused on the math for graphics so general principles have graphics applications and there aren't extra principles that are unneeded.

3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development
- by Fletcher Dunn & Ian Parberry

This book covers the basics of 3d math and then goes into more advanced topics. Subjects include coordinate systems, vectors, matrices, transformations, and geometry and triangles. It also covers some graphics-specific math including 3d spaces, fog, lighting, diffuse, specular, and ambient.

Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics
- by Eric Lengyel

This one is similar to 3D Math Primer and does a great job explaining all of the heavy math you need for 3d.

GPU & Shader Series

These books are collections of cool techniques you can use in your shaders. Each chapter is written by a different author and covers a unique technique. These books are pretty expensive, so I don't recommend getting all of them - but take a look at the table of contents and get the ones that cover the techniques you need.

GPU Gems

This series is sponsored by Nvidia. Some of these are available for free on Nvidia's web site.

GPU Pro - Edited by Wolfgang Engel

Another book series where each chapter is like a scholarly paper on a specific topic - but all focused on real-time and game graphics. Chapter authors are graphics researchers at universities as well as engineers in the video game industry.

ShaderX - Edited by Wolfgang Engel

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