3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes

"The first half of the book details the design of a modern 3D graphics engine: a shader-based architecture with an abstract rendering API fed by hierarchical culling and state sorting. The second half of the book upgrades the generic 3D engine to a virtual globe engine by adding high precision rendering, accurate globe rendering, vector data rendering, out-of-core rendering, and terrain rendering. The algorithms and techniques in the book are not tied to any particular programming language or rendering API but they will provide concrete examples in C#, OpenGL, and GLSL"--Provided by publisher.

Patrick Cozzi is a senior software developer on the 3D team at Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI). He is a contributor to SIGGRAPH and the Game Engine Gems series. Before joining AGI, he worked on storage systems in IBM’s Extreme Blue internship program at the Almaden Research Lab, interned with IBM’s z/VM operating system team, and interned with the chipset validation group at Intel. He earned a master’s degree in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Pennsylvania State University.

Kevin Ring is the lead architect of AGI Components at Analytical Graphics, Inc. In his software development career, he has worked on a wide range of software systems, from class libraries to web applications to 3D game engines to interplanetary spacecraft trajectory design systems. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.