When researching ways to model or animate something, it is essential to look at real life examples. You may find images on the Web easily enough but simple images normally will not give sufficient insight on underlying principles or inner workings. For these, the Wikipedia is a very useful resource and consulted for many things in this book. Below we list some samples.

A word of warning may be in order though. Wikipedia has proven itself over the years as a readily accessible and dependable source of information and its quality seems to be comparable to that of printed encyclopedias. However, anyone can alter that information and there may be different views on the subject, so it is always wise to check other resources as well, especially if these are difficult subjects. Good Wikipedia entries generally give a list of external references as well and it is a good idea to check a few of them.

These are some of the pages consulted when creating the examples in this book. A few of the more math oriented ones are listed here (they are referred to in the main text as well):

Of course, there is more to life than just the Wikipedia and the following two sites proved exceptionally useful when implementing the iridescence shader:

Finally, these sites are worth a special mention: