Computer graphics is a vast field, and getting larger every day. It is impossible to cover every topic of interest, even within a specialization such as CG rendering. For many years, Noriko Kurachi has reported on the latest developments for Japanese readers in her monthly column for CG World. Being something of a pioneer herself, she selected topics that represented original and promising new directions for research, as opposed to the tried and true methods. Many of these novel ideas paid off handsomely, and these are the topics covered in this book. Starting from the basic behavior of light, Ms. Kurachi introduces the most useful techniques for global and local illumination using geometric descriptions of an environment in the first section. She then goes on to describe image-based techniques that rely on captured data to do their magic in the second section. In the final section, she looks at the synthesis of these two complementary approaches and what they mean for the future of computer graphics.