CS465: Computer Graphics I—Fall 2006

Announcements

8 December: A treasury of vintage exams is now available for your perusal as you study for the final. The final is scheduled on Monday (11 December) at 2:00 pm in Hollister 110 and runs for 2.5 hours.

25 November: There is a small change to the file format spec for antialiasing. See the ray2 assignment page.

20 November: John K.'s office hours that were scheduled for Tuesday 21 Nov will be replaced by an extra office hour the following week, on Wednesday 29 Nov, from 3:30 to 4:30.

20 November: The Ray II help session will be tonight at 6pm in Rhodes 455.

1 November: Greg's office hours that were scheduled for Thursday 2 Nov will be held on Friday 3 Nov, from 12:30 to 1:30.

31 October: The pipeline help session scheduled for tomorrow night will take place on Thursday 2 Nov instead. Also, Michael will not hold his office hours tomorrow, 1 Nov.

11 October: The model help session originally planned for tonight will be held next week at the same time, instead.

25 September: The schedule is slightly rearranged. The first midterm will be on Wednesday, October 4, and one homework has been removed to prevent deadlines piling up too close together.

16 September: There is a small revision to hw4.

6 September: There is a fix to the ray1 framework; see the ray1 assignment page.

5 September: There are new test scenes posted on the ray1 assignment page.

4 September: There are updates to the hw1 FAQ, and the ray1 assignment page has some information on IDE setup.

1 September: Due to slowness in setting up TA support, we are accepting hw1 on the due date for hw2, though we urge you to turn it in if you are done with it, so that you can get on with hw2.

25 August: Welcome to CS465! Be sure to check this space regularly, because we'll use it for announcements you won't want to miss.

Readings

Readings are specified for each topic in lecture. They come mainly from the two course textbooks:

Some readings also consist of published articles that are available on the Web. Many of these are in the ACM Digital Library, which you can access from any machine on the Cornell campus network.

Two other kinds of references exist besides the readings. The lecture slides are available for all topics, and for some topics additional lecture notes are available. These references are linked off the schedule page (as are the readings listed here).

general background

Shirley Ch.2 and 5
These chapters review some mathematical tools we'll be using throughout the semester: some very basic topology, trigonometry, and linear algebra; representations of curves and surfaces in 2D and 3D; and some games with triangles. We will not be covering this material explicitly in this course, but I will review specific topics as they arise in the course. Especially if some of this material is new to you, it will be worthwhile to study this carefully, because it's important for this basic math to be second nature to you as we move forward.

introduction

Shirley Ch. 1
This brief chapter goes through the same kind of intro I will do in class, and also covers various practical issues that will be useful to keep in mind during the assignments. Skim over the C++-specific parts of 1.7 and 1.8, since we'll be using Java.

images

Shirley 3.1–3.4
These sections will give you a preview of the question "what is an image?" and a very brief discussion of alpha and compositing (which we will discuss in more detail later). The rest of the chapter we will cover later.

ray tracing I

Shirley 10.1–10.5
This chapter covers ray tracing in more depth than we will need at this point, so I'm only asking you to read the first part. Since Shirley places ray tracing later in the sequence of topics, there are some parts (mainly involving geometric transformations) that build on material we haven't covered, which you can safely ignore for now. The Ray I handout can serve as a guide to the material that's specifically needed for that assignment.

lighting and shading I

Shirley Ch. 9
This chapter goes over the basic shading models, plus a bit of a digression on artistic shading. It discusses issues of surfaces that are approximated by triangles more than we need at this point, so you can skim over that aspect for now.

sampling and reconstruction

Shirley Ch. 4
The first half of this chapter covers sampling, filtering, and reconstruction. You don't need to read the part on sampling theory.

2D transformations

Shirley Ch. 6
This chapter goes through the mechanics of transformations in 2D and 3D, with a bit less motivation and abstraction than in lecture (this could be good or bad depending on your viewpoint). Section 5.1.6 covers decomposition of transformations, which we won't need, so don't stress over it too much if it's confusing (it can also be very illuminating, depending on what background you are coming from).

scene graphs

Shirley Ch.13.3
This is a very brief discussion of the basics of scene graphs, without instancing.

3D transformations

Shirley Ch.6 again

viewing II

Shirley Ch. 7
This chapter goes over the basics of orthographic and perspective viewing and derives the projection matrices for those two cases. It's pretty compact, so you may have to puzzle over some parts carefully.

spline curves

Shirley Ch. 15
This chapter presents much of the same material found in the lectures, including piecewise linear, hermite, Bézier, and B-spline curves, in a reasonably compatible style. Note that the book orders the powers of t the other way from the lectures, leading to spline matrices that are flipped bottom to top.

parametric surfaces

FvDFH Ch. 11

rasterization | hidden surface removal

Shirley 2.10 & 2.11
These sections discuss linear interpolation and barycentric coordinates for triangles, which are very important for interpolating values in rasterization.

Shirley 3.5 & 3.6
These sections discuss rasterization of lines and triangles. He presents triangle rasterization algorithm in terms of barycentric coordinates rather than edge equations, but there is no real difference between the two.

vertex and fragment processing

pipeline transformations

Shirley Ch. 12
This chapter gives a rather sketchy outline of graphics pipelines with too much emphasis on clipping but some very good discussion of the homogeneous coordinates of primitives as they are transformed to the screen.

texture mapping I

Shirley Ch. 11
You can skim 11.1, since it covers 3D textures and procedural textures, which we don't discuss.

compositing

Porter & Duff, Compositing digital images (1984)
This classic article introduced image compositing and still describes exactly how compositing is done today. It does cover quite a bit more detail than we will go over in this class. (You need to be inside Cornell to retrieve the full text from this link to the ACM digital library.)

triangle meshes

Shirley Ch. 13.1

ray tracing II

Shirley Ch. 10.6–11

ray tracing acceleration

Shirley Ch. 10.9

surface reflection

Shirley Ch. 24

lighting and shading II

monte carlo

Shirley Ch. 14.1–4, Ch. 23

texture mapping II

Shirley Ch. 20 & 21
Chapter 21 covers human vision in more detail than I did in lecture, but it's fascinating reading (and pretty easy going). The optical illusions are fun. Chapter 20 covers about the same material as the lecture, but goes into somewhat more detail than we need in 20.5–20.7.