So, we have come to the end of this textbook. Computer graphics is a large field, and we have covered only a small part of it. There is only room for so much in a one-semester course, but I hope that I have covered enough of the core fundamental concepts to provide a solid foundation for further study. And I hope that you can look at applications of computer graphics with new understanding. When you look at video games or computer animation, you should see geometry and transformations, lighting and materials, hierarchical modeling, and textures.
If there is ever a second edition of this textbook, I would like to add some additional material on implementing graphics algorithms in WebGL, including shadow algorithms, particle systems, and user interaction. There are a few more parts of the WebGL API that I should cover, most notably the extension mechanism that makes it possible for vendors to add functionality to the standard API. And I should say something about parts of the modern OpenGL API that are not part of WebGL, such as geometry shaders.
This book has covered only one kind of computer graphics—the real-time graphics that is used in interactive graphics programs and video games. For real-time graphics, images must be rendered very quickly. When more time in available for rendering, such as when creating high-quality computer animation for movies, more computation-intensive techniques such as ray-tracing are used. It would be nice to add at least some basic discussion of those techniques.
But perhaps the first change that I will make is to add some exercises and programming projects. To learn about programming, a person needs to write programs. I used this textbook for a course in computer graphics in Fall 2015, and an essential part of the course was a programming lab. Interested readers can visit the web site for my graphics course, including links to lab exercises, at http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs424.