Fundamentals-Of-Computer-Graphics-5th-CN: a Chinese translation with uneven coverage

A translation the author finished on 2024.4.30

The repository is a Chinese translation of Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, the fifth edition, and doubles as the personal study notes of the translator. The author dates the completion of the translation to 2024.4.30 and states that some chapters contain errors and awkward phrasing because of gaps in their own understanding, with the intention of improving them on a later reread. That warning is unusual to see stated so plainly, and it tells a reader exactly what kind of artefact this is: a working reading record rather than a published edition. The scope covers the whole book. The progress checklist marks all twenty-three chapters as done, from the introduction and mathematical basis in chapters 1 and 2 through raster images, ray tracing, surface shading, linear algebra and transformation matrices, views, the graphics pipeline, signal processing, texture mapping, graphics data structures, sampling, physically based rendering, curves, computer animation, graphics hardware, color, visual perception, tone reproduction, implicit modeling, computer graphics in games, and visualization. A separate Chinese README exists for the project.

Where the translation is deliberately thin

Coverage is complete, but fidelity is not uniform, and the author is explicit about where the work is weakest. Foundational groundwork was only selectively translated, namely the mathematical basis in chapters 1 and 2, linear algebra in chapters 6 and 7, and digital image processing in chapter 10. Chapters the author found mathematically hard, listed as chapter 13 on sampling, chapter 15 on curves, and chapter 21 on implicit modeling, are translated less well. Areas the author knows less well are also flagged as possibly inaccurate. The main content of every other chapter is translated, so the practical question is not whether a chapter exists but how much you should trust its wording. The author also recommends a reading order that is not the book's own: chapters 1 through 14 are tied closely to core graphics knowledge, while chapters 15 through 23 hold advanced material such as curves, animation and graphics hardware, plus adjacent fields such as color, vision and visualization.

Machine translation for prose, hand translation for formulas

The stated method differs by text type, and this is the single most useful thing to know about the repository. Introductory text was handled with machine translation plus small edits, while principle text, the core reasoning such as mathematical formulas, was translated by the author personally after reading the passage. That split means the exposition of a concept may read loosely while the derivation beside it was reasoned through by a human. It also predicts where errors will cluster. An unedited machine rendering of a paragraph is a plausible thing to misread as the original argument, whereas the mathematical passages are the parts most likely to survive contact with a careful reader. Related standalone notes extend the same approach to specific topics, and the repository keeps them outside the numbered chapter files.

Extra notes on the topics readers argue about

Beyond the twenty-three chapter files, the root directory holds a set of standalone essays that go deeper than the book does. Titles cover the conditions for the unbiasedness and validity of Monte Carlo importance sampling, distribution transforms inside importance sampling, a derivation of the perspective projection matrix, perspective-correct interpolation, Bezier curves and B-spline curves, and Markov chains with Metropolis sampling. Two more entries are PDFs, one on the Moller-Trumbore ray and triangle intersection algorithm and one named for its author, plus separate PDF files for the fourth and fifth editions of the book itself. A Prettier formatting plugin was applied across the whole document on 2024-07-16 to make the rendering more comfortable, and the pic directory holds the images the text references. A directory listing is the fastest way to see what a given chapter contains before reading it in full.

Cloning the repository and reading it in Obsidian

There is no build step, no package to install and no server to start, since this is a collection of Markdown documents. The quick start in the project description is a clone followed by opening the files in a Markdown reader:

git clone https://github.com/NWPU66/Fundamentals-Of-Computer-Graphics-5th-CN.git

After the clone you should see one Markdown file per chapter, named with the chapter number, alongside the extra notes listed above and the pic directory. The author used Obsidian while writing, and recommends any Markdown reader. For a first session, the sensible order is to open the chapter files you actually need rather than the full list, since the chapters depend on each other: the mathematics in chapters 1 and 2 is used throughout, and chapters 6 and 7 supply the linear algebra that later chapters assume. Obsidian's link and graph features also work on these files if the notes use wiki-style links, which the extra notes appear to, so a reader can follow a derivation sideways into a related essay.

A texel correction that shows the notes were revised

The update log records a correction on 2024-07-04 that is worth reading as a sample of the work. The author had translated every occurrence of Texel as a pixel element, then realised the accurate Chinese terms are texture element or texel, and fixed the passages. The accompanying note defines the term: a screen pixel corresponds to an irregular region in texture space, so computing the screen pixel value means averaging color over that region, and each sampled texel of the texture is one element of it. Two further articles were added on 2024-12-8, on the unbiasedness and validity conditions of Monte Carlo importance sampling and on distribution transforms in importance sampling. These log entries are the best available signal about the project's rhythm, and they show revision driven by terminology corrections and by writing deeper notes on sampling, rather than by new chapters arriving on a schedule.

No declared licence and a last push on 2026-07-18

Two facts about the repository matter for anyone planning to reuse its text. First, no licence is declared for the project, and the root listing contains no LICENSE file, so there is no stated grant covering the translated text, the two PDF copies of the book, or the images. Anyone republishing or redistributing the translations is on their own there, and the same applies to commercial use. Second, the repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-07-18, which is more recent than the newest entry in the update log, so the branch can change without a matching changelog entry. There are no GitHub releases either, so there is no tagged version to pin a fork to and no release notes to read. For most readers the practical cost of following the project is a periodic git pull and the possibility that wording changes under them.

Editorial conclusion

This repository suits Chinese-speaking graphics students who want a worked reading of the fifth edition alongside the original, and who will read chapters 13, 15 and 21 with a second source at hand. It does not suit someone who needs a uniform, professionally reviewed edition, because the author states plainly that several chapters were translated less accurately and that some are machine translated with light editing. Before relying on it, check the chapter list against the topics you actually need, confirm the rendering of the mathematical passages in your Markdown reader, and settle the licensing question yourself, since the repository declares no licence at all and the last push was on 2026-07-18.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. NWPU66/Fundamentals-Of-Computer-Graphics-5th-CN on GitHub
3. README