Readings
Readings are specified for each topic in lecture. They come mainly from the two course textbooks:
- Shirley = Peter Shirley. Fundamentals of Computer Graphics. AK Peters, 2001. (the required textbook)
- FvDFH = Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2e. Addison Wesley, 1990. (the supplementary textbook—on reserve at the Engineering Library)
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 4
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 9.1–9.5
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 and the details of generating eye rays)
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. 8
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 | sampling theory
Sampling notes
These notes, actually a rough draft of a
chapter for Shirley's next edition, cover sampling, reconstruction, and
sampling theory using an approach similar to the one I am using in lecture.
Sadly, the notes are currently lacking in figures (and in detail in some
areas) so you will want to read them with the slides or the following chapter
next to it.
FvDFH 14.10
This section (available only within Cornell) is another fairly in-depth
discussion of sampling theory as it applies to graphics.
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.
2D transformations
Shirley Ch. 5
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).
3D transformations
Shirley Ch.5 again
viewing
Shirley Ch. 6
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.
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 operations
pipeline transformations
Shirley Ch. 11
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. 10
You can skim 10.1, since it covers 3D textures and procedural textures, which
we don't discuss.
curves and surfaces
spline curves
Shirley Ch. 13
This chapter discusses spline curves and surfaces together (rather than
separately as we do in lecture) and discusses arbitrary-order Bézier
curves and surfaces, where we stuck to cubic. You can skim the last section,
on subdivision surfaces, because we aren't covering those.
spline surfaces
Shirley Ch. 13 again
triangle meshes
ray tracing II
ray tracing acceleration
surface reflection
lighting and shading II
monte carlo
texture mapping II
Shirley Ch. 17 & 18
Chapter 17 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 18 covers about the same material as the lecture, but goes into
somewhat more detail than we need in 18.5–18.7.