Syllabus, Fall '97

• A. Introduction
  • What is Computer Graphics? (Ch. 1, skim Ch. 2)
  • Administrative matters
  • Programming tools: OpenGL etc.
• B. Raster & Image Algorithms (Ch. 3, 17.6.1-2, 17.7.1)
  • What's a raster image?
  • What's a pixel?
  • Flood fill, dithering
  • Point processing (contrast enhancement, compositing)
  • Filtering
• C. Geometric Modeling (Ch. 11 & 12)
  • Polygons and polygon meshes (11.1)
  • Spline curves: Natural, Hermite, Bezier, etc. (11.2)
  • Recursive subdivision, forward differencing
  • Bicubic surfaces (11.3)
  • Solid primitives, sweeps, B-reps (12.3, 12.4, 12.5)
  • Implicit surfaces, quadrics, blobs
  • Booleans, CSG, (12.2, 12.7)
  • Fractals
• D. Transformations: (Ch. 5, Appendix)
  • Homogeneous vector and matrix notation (mathematical background)
  • 2D/3D Transformations
  • Interlude: PostScript page description language
  • Chaining transformations
  • Nonlinear transformations (free form deformation)
• E. Modeling Hierarchies (Ch. 7)
  • What hierarchies are and why we use them
  • Matrix stack primitives
  • Hierarchy Algorithms
  • Modeling examples
  • Getting the right "control knobs"
  • Hierarchies w/nonlinear transformations
  • Interface and implementation issues
• F. 3D Viewing and Projection: (skim Ch. 6)
  • Perspective projection
  • Viewing and view volumes
  • Clipping (3.11, 3.12)
• G. Animation: (Ch. 21)
  • Traditional cel animation
  • Keyframes: state space points and trajectories
  • Inbetweening: linear interpolation,
  • interpolating splines, slow in and out, etc.
  • Procedural animation
  • Inverse Kinematics
  • Dynamics
  • Interface and implementation issues.
• H. Rendering Basics (Ch. 13, 15 & 16)
  • Line and polygon scan conversion (3.1-3.3, 3.6)
  • Painter's algorithm (15.5)
  • Z-buffer algorithm (15.4)
  • Light and Color (13)
  • Illumination and reflection (16.1)
  • Gouraud & Phong shading (16.2)
  • Texture Mapping (16.3)
• I. Ray tracing
• Ray-surface intersection testing (15.10)
• Ray casting
• Shadows and Transparency(16.4-5)
• Recursive ray tracing (16.12)
• Spatial data structures for optimization (12.6)
• J. Miscellaneous Topics
  • Who knows? might include
    • Graphics Hardware
    • Video
    • Physically Based Modeling

  15-462, Computer Graphics 1
  

  ph@cs.cmu.edu 26 Aug 1997