ECSE-4750 Computer Graphics, Fall 2007, W. Randolph Franklin
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY USA
(:nogroup:)
Syllabus
moved aside to Syllabus.
(:showhide div=modules init=show lshow='Show Possible lecture modules' lhide='Hide Possible lecture modules':)
Possible lecture modules
Computational geometry
ECSE-6800 will contain modules in topics like these:
- Theory
- Shamos & Preparata
- Lee & Preparata paper
- some newer review
- Practice
- Computational Geometry Algorithms Library, (CGAL)
- LEDA
- st from Edelsbrunner?
- homework
- implement spacewar
Color
Something from SIGGRAPH
- SIGGRAPH 2000 course
Migrating to an Object Oriented Graphics API c15color.pdf
GIS
- Geographic Information Systems and Science, including an intro to ESRI's ArcGIS.
CAD
Graphics HW including GPUs
- e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R520
- programmable GPUs
L-systems
Architecture of a simple graphics system
(:showhide div=modules lshow='Show Possible lecture modules' lhide='Hide Possible lecture modules':)
Lectures
I'll write a one sentence summary of each lecture, after the class, and also use this for announcements.
No | Date | Summary |
1 | Mon Jan 14 |
|
2 | Thu Jan 17 |
|
3 | Thu Jan 24 |
|
4 | Mon Jan 28 |
|
5 | Thu Jan 31 |
|
6 | Mon Feb 4 |
|
7 | Thu Feb 7 |
|
Mon Feb 11 |
no class
| |
Thu Feb 14 |
| |
8 | Tues Feb 19 |
|
9 | Thu Feb 21 |
|
10 | Mon Feb 25 |
|
11 | Thu Feb 28 |
|
12 | Fri Feb 29 |
DREAMWORKS ANIMATION ON CAMPUS DREAMWORKS ANIMATION COMPANY OVERVIEW with Marilyn Friedman, Head of Outreach Friday, February 29th, 2008 4:00 - 5:00 PM, Sage 3303 This presentation will give an overview of how movies are made at DreamWorks Animation and the skills and experiences necessary to work in the CG Animation field. Marilyn will show clips from some upcoming films, explain the DreamWorks Animation production workflow and talk about how to present yourself in your resumes and demo reels to grab the attention of employers. She will also be showing examples of successful demo reels so you can see what will land you a job in the CG Animation, Visual Effects and Gaming industry. The presentation is open to all students. DreamWorks Animation is particularly interested in meeting EMAC, EART, CSCI, ARCH & PDI/DIS students. While they have a limited number of interview slots for this visit, they will take submissions of resumes and reels from any students interested in employment or internships back with them. Please come by for this exciting event! For more information about DreamWorks Animation SKG, please visit http://www.dreamworksanimation.com |
13 | Mon Mar 3 |
|
14 | Thu Mar 6 |
|
15 | Mon Mar 17 |
|
16 | Thu Mar 20 |
See my notes at Splines. |
17 | Mon Mar 24 |
Continue with CAD splines and patches. |
18 | Thu Mar 27 |
Class replaced by Yahoo talk. |
19 | Mon Mar 31 |
CAD concluded |
20 | Thu Apr 3 |
Class replaced by John Hopcroft talk on future of CS |
21 | Mon Apr 7 |
Start GIS.
|
22 | Thu Apr 10 |
Continue GIS with a big computing example - finding the areas of the nonempty polygons of two overlaid planar graphs. Details: Overlaying Two Maps. |
23 | Mon Apr 14 |
Ctd. See also geo_ops_millions-jul2004/. |
No | Date | Summary |
24 | Thu Apr 17 |
|
25 | Mon Apr 21 |
Prof at NSF panelizing for 2 days. |
26 | Thu Apr 24 |
Student presentations:
|
27 | Mon Apr 28 |
Student presentations:
|
(:showhide init=show div=hw lshow='Show homeworks' lhide='Hide homeworks' :)
Homeworks
Homework 3 - due Thurs Mar 6
- Install and try some of the vertex and fragment shaders showed in class.
- Create a new vertex shader that perturbs vertex positions and normals in a wavy fashion. Map your initials in the waves made in a formerly regular grid of vertices.
- Create a new fragment shader to do bump mapping to fragment normals. Map your initials in the bumps.
- Email or hand in some sample output.
Homework 2 - due Mon Feb 18
- Install CGAL on your favorite system.
- Find or write a program that reads a list of 2D points and computes the 2D Voronoi diagram. Measure its execution time on input sets with 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 random points. Graph the execution time. Include sample output plots of the Voronoi diagrams for each size.
- What is a Nef polyhedron (in the context of CGAL)?
Homework 1 - due Jan 24
In this exercise, you need to generate a few pictures with increasing complexity using POV-Ray. We will, in particular, look at how to input a mesh into the scene, and how to improve the rendering of meshes. We use a simplified version of a famous model - Stanford bunny - with 880 triangles.
Helpful links
Directions
- We start with an empty scene.
- Template file: start.pov. Download, read, and render it.
- Some details about Camera setup.
- Some details about Light source.
- Plane: replace the floor with checker board.
- Try the different colors specified in colors.inc (list of colors). Notice the first line the beginning of start.pov.
- We next add a
sphere
and a
cone to the scene.
- Put the center of the sphere at (x,y,z)=(-2, 0, 0), and radius=1.
- Put one end of the cone at the center (x,y,z)=(2, -1, 0), and with radius=1. Put the other end of the cone at the center (x,y,z)=(2, 1, 0), and with radius=1.
- Notice that you only see half the sphere. Try modifying the plane to see the entire sphere and cone.
- Adjust your camera so that your output and the relative positions of sphere and cone are as follows:
- Is the image too dark? Try adding another light source.
- Try out some highlights and glass effects.
- We add a simple cube using
mesh between
the sphere and the cone.
- Put the content of cube_triangle into your .pov file.
- Read the code and understand how the cube is constructed out of triangles.
- Render your image, you should get something similar to:
- Replace the cube mesh with the Stanford bunny.
- Replace the triangles with the content of bunny_1.
- Render the image and notice the flat surface.
- Again replace the triangles with the content of bunny_2.
- Render the image and compare the result with the previous one. Explain why.
- Experiment with texture mapping with simple and advanced options.
- Hand in or email some screen dumps showing that you got it to work.
(:showhide div=hw lshow='Show homeworks' lhide='Hide homeworks' :)
(:showhide div=topics init=show lshow='Show Possible student presentation topics' lhide='Hide Possible student presentation topics':)
Possible student presentation topics
Research labs
- Brown University - Computer Graphics Group (available)
- U North Carolina - Graphics and Image Analysis Research (available)
- Duke - Visualization Technology Group (available)
- U Texas/Austin - Graphics Lab, Department of the Computer Sciences (available)
- U Washington - Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Animation (available)
- Microsoft - Research - Graphics (available)
- IBM Research - Graphics & Visualization (available)
- Caltech - Computer Graphics and Multi-Res Modeling. (Al Barr is an RPI alum.) (available)
- U Waterloo - Computer Graphics Lab (available)
- Georgia Tech - Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center, including Animation Lab (available)
- Ohio State - Computer Graphics Research, Computer Animation, Geometric Modeling, & Volume Visualization (available)
- ICASE - Visualization and Graphics. This lab has closed, but it's still interesting. (available)
- Stanford - Computer Graphics Lab (available)
- UC Berkeley - Multimedia, Human Computer Interaction and Computer Graphics (available)
- UC Santa Cruz - Lab for Visualization and Graphics (available)
- U Utah - Computer Graphics (available)
- U Geneva - MIRAlab (available)
- MIT (available)
- Pixar (available)
- Raindrop Geomagic (available)
- Princeton (available)
- Any other interesting place - you pick. (available)
Misc presentable ideas
- PenroseTilings
- StereoGraphs
- AlumniPatents
- MayaSW
- Z-Corp
- Augmented Reality Gaming
(:showhide div=topics lshow='Show Possible student presentation topics' lhide='Hide Possible student presentation topics':)
Computational Geometry
- Implementing geometry is totally different from doing it on paper and proving theorems. Ex: convex hull.
- The book Computational Geometry by Preparata and Shamos remains one of the most understandable intros to Computational Geometry. The only concern is that is old enough that some recent topics are not covered. We will do some of it.
- Mathworld on Computational Geometry