Computer Graphics

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Since there are programmers around here, I was wandering if someone would know the answers to a few questions.

What kind of maths do you need for graphics programming? I ask this because my calculus knowledge only goes as far as vector calculus (stokes and all) but I don’t know any complex analysis or fourier transforms and whatnot. Is this kind of maths necessary? I know signal processing people need them, but they do stuff with real analog signals.

The thing is I love programming but I’m not a fan of signal processing (we had some introduction to it), but I’d love to work with computer graphics. So how much is there in common between say doing stuff with digital samplings of analog images and computer generated graphics? We learned about aliasing in sound signals, and I know anti-aliasing techniques are used in CG, so I thought there must be something in common.

2

3D rendering is mostly linear algebra (and mostly a pretty easy application of linear algebra since you’re only working in 3 dimensions), geometry and trig.

2D image analysis type graphics work uses different forms of math depending upon what you’re doing, but it is mostly signal-processing stuff of the type you’re already talking about.

3

Computer vision, which is basically the inverse of computer graphics (turning an image into information) seems to involve lots of really scary math.