python a bust?

[Andrew Dalke]

Brandon J. Van Every:
> You've gotta be kidding me.  Even 12 years ago, "Computer Graphics:
> Principles and Practice" didn't teach texture mapping.  Along came DOOM.

============
I have a 2nd ed. copy of Foley&van Dam (&Feiner & Hughes) which
has that title and is (c) 1990. I used for a class in that year.  That's
13 years ago.

In the index under "Texture mapping" -- "See Surface Detail"
In the index under "Surface detail" -- references to pp 741-745

============  (all typos mine)
16.3 SURFACE DETAIL

Applying and of the shading models we have descrive so far to planar or
bicubic surfaces produces smooth, uniform surfaces -- in marked contrast
to most of the surface we see and feel.  We discuss next a variety of
methods developed to simulate this missing surface detail.

16.3.1 Surface-Detail Polygons
 ...
16.3.2 Texture Mapping

As detail becomes finer and more intricate, explicit modeling with
polygons or other geometric primitives becomes less practical.  An
alternative is to map an image ... a technique pioneered by Catmull
[CATM74b] and refined by Blinn and Newell [BLIN76].  This
approach is known as texture mapping or pattern mapping ...
  ...
The approach just described assumes square pixel geometry and
simple box filtering.  It also fails to take into account pixels that
map to only part of a surface.  Fiebush, Levoy, and Cook
[FEIB80] address these problems for texture-mapping polygons.
... [It] can be quite inefficient [and we discuss other approaches
in] Section 17.4.3.  Catumull and Smith's efficient technique [CATM80]
for mapping an entire texture map directly to a surface is discussed
in Excercise 17.10.  Heckberg [HECK86] provides a thorough
survey of texture-mapping methods.

16.3.3 Bump Mapping
 ...
 17.4.2  Other Pattern Mapping Techniques

  [discussion of mip maps]

============

So it was discussed, with an overview of how it works and
the different approaches and pointers to literature references
for more info.

(Nit-picker?  Me?  Nahhh.  :)

In addition, SGIs in 1990 could be bought with texture
mapping hardware, or emulated texture maps in software.
That was the 'VGXT' (or something like that) naming scheme.
"Vertex / Graph / ....? / Texture", depending on what was
done in hardware.  As I recall -- memory fading after all
these years and I never was much of a hardware guy.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com