	Computer Laboratory Advanced Graphics

Computer Laboratory > Course material 2003-04 > Advanced Graphics

Advanced Graphics
2003-04

Principal lecturer: Dr Neil Dodgson
Taken by: Part II

Note: the section of the course on radiosity is not examinable this year.

Handouts

Syllabus
The Study Guide in HTML (the slightly different printed version is available in PDF)
Some Mathematical Elements of Graphics (SMEG) in PDF
Powerpoint slides (lectures 3 and 6) in PDF (490 kB). The Powerpoint presentation is also available as a self-running presentation (1.4 MB); this allows you to view the animations if you have a Windows PC. Both of these are only available from within the .cam.ac.uk domain
A simplistic pseudocode version of the ray tracing algorithm
Some algorithmic detail about Constructive Solid Geometry
Solution notes to some exam questions

Exercises and exam questions

There are two sets of exercises. You should expect to have two supervisions, one on each set of exercises.

Exercise set 1 for the first supervision, covering material from the first five lectures.
Exercise set 2 for the second supervision, covering material from the last three lectures.

Past exam questions are in two places: Advanced Graphics (98, 99, 02, 03) and Advanced Graphics and HCI (00, 01).

A starter exercise: Write a simple ray tracer. To make it as simple as possible, you could limit it to the following features: (1) only one type of primitive object: the sphere; (2) only one type of light source: either point lights or directional lights (which are roughly the same as point lights at infinity); and (3) only specular, diffuse and ambient lighting (using the model taught in Part IB). If you then want to extend it to do more interesting things, consider adding extra primitive objects, perfect mirror reflection, transparency and refraction. Beyond this you could experiment with texture mapping and bump mapping.

Useful web sites

General

A wide range of instructional materials covering various areas in Computer Graphics, provided by SIGGRAPH.

Ray tracing

A gallery of ray traced images at ART.
An applet which demonstrates how the ray tracing algorithm works.
For practical experience of ray tracing, download and play with either POVray (http://www.povray.org/) or Rayshade (http://graphics.stanford.edu/~cek/rayshade/). At right are three POVray's scenes. The wood box scene comes with the POVray release. The two images of spheres are simple scenes, for which the source is available: basic spheres, ring of spheres inside a sphere.

Beziers, B-splines and NURBS

Bezier and B-Spline applets with which you can play to get more intuition as to how these things work, provided by the Computer Science department at Technion.

Implicits and CSG

There is a nice discussion of past and current research in implicit surfaces and CSG provided by Brian Wyvill.
HyperFun - a modelling package which uses implicit surfaces as its principal modelling primitive.

Subdivision

The subdivision.org website which compliments the book "Subdivision Methods For Geometric Design: A Constructive Approach" by Joe Warren and Henrik Weimer. It has a short tutorial on subdivision and Java applets illustrating both curve and surface subdivision.

Radiosity