General Course Information


Notes on lab software


Web pages of interest

Introduction to Computer Graphics

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Lens Focal Length. (3/10)
  • Lighting methods. (3/9)
  • Images formed by ideal lenses and mirrors. (3/8)
  • Lab #6 has been finalized. (3/5)
  • I updated the Motion Blur web page with images that jitter the time template values - look at the difference when jittering is used in the longer displacements. It's not perfect, but a definite improvement over not using jittering. (3/5)
  • Here is some playing around I did with motion blur. (3/3)
  • As a follow-up to the posting about the teapot, Sean made the following teapot scene description file available. (2/28)
  • A draft version of Lab #6 has been posted. (2/27)
  • Triangle data for a teapot can be found here (thanks to Sean Wedig for this pointer). The 'Utah Teapot' is a dataset that was used as an informal standard for testing various algorithms in published papers. For example, see The History of the Teapot ). More recently the 'Stanford Bunny' and other models from Stanford have been used (see The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository ). (2/26)
  • The basic form of my solid texture was:
    if ( ((int)(((y+k1+sin(k2*x*z*z)))*k3)%k4) == 0) {
    
    where:
    • k3 and k4 control the thickness of the bands: 0<k4<k3<10
    • k2 controls the frequency of the sin curve: 0<k2<5
    • k1 positions the pattern in space: k1 around 1000
    This was just randomly modified until I got something that I liked - no rocket science here. have fun. (2/25)
  • I've updated some of the images for Lab #4 and Lab #5. (2/19)
  • A draft version of Lab #5 has been posted. (2/17)

Archive of Previous announcements

Graphics Curriculum: This course and 782, on photorealistic rendering, are the two courses on rendering. There is a short introduction to 782 at the end of this course. This is the entry course for graphics for graduate students. Undergraduates should take CIS581 (CIS694G) first (mainly because 581 contains more immediately-useful material and makes more sense if you end up taking only one course in graphics). Undergraduates who are serious about studying computer graphics and who do well in 581 (or who are strong academically) are welcome to take CSE681.

Labs: In this course, you program your own ray tracer, including illumination modeling, texture mapping, object modeling.

Text: Realistic Ray Tracing by Peter Shirley; either first or second edition. The first edition actually matches this class better but the second edition can be used - the 'readings' have page numbers for both editions.

Class attendance: Students are expected to attend class. If you miss a class, you are responsible for finding out what material was covered, what announcements were made, and what assignments were made. (Don't come to me and ask me to present the material to you)

Common questions about the class:

  1. Student (i.e., someone you know): Do I really need to buy the book?
    Professor (that would be me): You don't *need* to buy the book. There is a lot of material about ray tracing, and graphics in general, on the web . You are responsible for what I cover in class and there are on-line slides to hel p you follow along. The slides, however, are not a tutorial for the class; we will discuss things in class, not explicitly in the slides, that you are responsible for knowing. Almost all of the material I cover is from the book, so the book provides a good secondary source for the class material.
  2. Student: What's the minimum I need to do to get a good grade?
    Professor: 2 things: 1) come to class and 2) keep up on the labs. Students who don't do these 2 things have a much tougher time.
  3. Student: I'm graduating this quarter...
    Professor: Only if you earn whatever grade you need to graduate.
Information for Winter 2011




Last updated 9/30/09