In this book, a variety of algoritbms are described that may be of
interest to everyone who writes software for 3D-graphics. It is a book
that haB been written for programmers at an intermediate level as well
aB for experienced software engineers who simply want to have some
particular functions at their disposal, without having to think too much
about details like special cases or optimization for speed. The
programming language we use is C, and that has many advantages, because
it makes the code both portable and efficient. Nevertheless, it should
be possible to adapt the ideas to other high-level programming
languages. The reader should have a reasonable knowledge of C, because
sophisticated pro- grams with economical storage household and fast
sections cannot be written without the use of pointers. You will find
that in the long run it is just aB easy to work with pointer variables
as with multiple arrays . .Aß the title of the book implies, we will not
deal with algorithms that are very computation-intensive such as ray
tracing or the radiosity method. Furthermore, objects will always be
(closed or not closed) polyhedra, which consist of a certain number of
polygons.