Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface Late at night, 1997, in some little one-bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue, in Lexington, Kentucky, I installed my very first 3D software on my self-built HP Windows 95 workstation. It had 64 megabytes of RAM and an Intel Pentium 32 gigahertz processor. Caligari Truespace was an ancient VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) authoring software that I had downloaded for free. It was my very first experience with 3D graphics. I had seen it in movies. I had seen it in video games. But I had never really held the tools of creation in my hands and manipulated objects in 3D space before. I eagerly navigated around the interface of the default scene file, which was strewn with various old-timey 3D objects: a teapot, a house, a spider, and a roller coaster. I selected the spider and chose the "rotate" tool, and for the very first time in my life, I manipulated a model in three dimensions on a computer screen. There was no going back. From that one particular moment in time and space, a light went on in my head and I was obsessed. I could not stop thinking about 3D animation. The possibilities exploded. The next 14 years of my life would be a single-minded drive down that same road, without ever stopping to wonder if I was on the right path. 3D graphics were my passion and aspiration. And although that path was ultimately successful, I had a long way to go in terms of my basic understanding. Here is the problem: I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know a damn thing about 3D graphics.

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