Books on High-end Graphics Programming?

Kitsune Sushi asks: "Whenever I want to learn something I don't have any previous experience with, I try to find a halfway decent book on the subject (usually from O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley). Most of my experience revolves around C/C++ and Perl, but I've never really felt the need to do any graphics programming (I usually confine myself to a CLI on GNU/Linux.. I don't care about eye candy). However, I've recently taken interest in doing a project that requires some rather intense knowledge of graphics programming." Sounds like a call for recommendations...(more)

Kitsune continues: "Specifically, I need to be able to do 3D animation, and make it look good.. real good. I'm not precisely sure which flavor of graphical styles I'll be aiming for (I'd like to know more about the subject beforehand), but I've been toying with the idea of something that renders a lot like the animation found in the higher quality anime (no, not like Pokemon =P). So, basically what I'm asking is this: are there are decent books out there that offer the oppurtunity to get some good working knowledge of high-end computer graphics programming? The book(s) doesn't necessarily have to be marketed to complete newbies (I'd imagine most would assume a good grip on programming to begin with, anyway.. and no, I'm not interested in using Java or any other language I'm not already familiar with unless there is an overriding reason why it would be a good idea).

There really don't seem to be any books from "a name you can trust" out there (that were printed sometime within the last year or so.. books from 1995 aren't likely to be very helpful to me), so I was wondering if anyone out there with more experience with graphics programming had anything they would like to recommend. =)"

Comments

All the good stuff is patented

[heroine]

Well there's http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html
a comprehensive list of many 3D graphics engines.

If you want the best stuff you have to break a few patents and read a few research papers. The latest motion vectoring techniques and modelling techniques are usually only in IEEE journals or something really dry in your college library. They're also usually patented, so you can either spend lots of money on the latest patented algorithms or spend lots of money coding obsolete, unpatented algorithms.