E.1. Computer Graphics

These days, computers have invaded the field of art. They have been used in many graphical applications such as interior designing, architectural planning, flight simulation, virtual museums, pencil drawings, caricature generation, video games, animations, etc. The journey of computer graphics formally began in 1963, when Ivan Sutherland, the father of Computer Graphics, demonstrated the use of computers for the interactive design of line drawings. Sutherland developed a system, called Sketchpad, for man-machine interactive picture generation that made people aware of the potential capabilities of the computers that can be used in the field of graphics. His work gave a boost to the developments in the field of computer graphics, and by the end of 1970, a large number of algorithms existed for scan conversion, hidden line/surface removal, shading and rendering. These developments were sufficient for computer graphics to be adopted as an efficient, powerful and economical tool by engineers, scientists, designers, illustrators and artists.

This appendix provides a basic introduction about graphics programming using Turbo C 3.0. However, if you are passionate about graphics programming and want to develop some real-time graphical applications, I suggest you learn and use Open Graphics Library (OpenGL). OpenGL consists of over 250 standard library functions that can be used to draw two-dimensional and three-dimensional scenes, which are as realistic as photographs.