Advanced Graphics
2006-07

Exercises

• Exercise set 1 for the first supervision, covering material up to and including splines.
• Exercise set 2 for the second supervision, covering material from subdivision to radiosity (inclusive).

Useful web sites

General

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

Graphics hardware

nVIDIA's Introduction to the Graphics Pipeline -- inclusion of this link does not constitute endorsement of nVIDIA's products

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. The B-spline applet was used in the lecture on 9 May.
• A B-spline tutorial with applets, which allow you to modify the knot spacing.
• A B-spline tutorial and applet at Imperial College.
• A basic B-spline demonstrator at University of Michigan.

• 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.

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.
• Three applets: basic implicit surface, implicit surface toggling between addition (standard implicit) and maximum (CSG union), implicit surface where the primitives have exclusion zones, implicit surface attempting to imitate water (but not succeeding).
  To see the Java source code, replace .html with .java in the hyperlinks.

Radiosity

• The colour images from Buss chapter XI are available as a PDF (327kB)

Animation

• Water simulations from the final lecture (23 May 2007).
  To see the Java source code, replace .html with .java in the hyperlinks.
  The rather poor "blobby water simulations" are under "Implicit and CSG" above.
• Animations demonstrating how implicit surfaces ("metaballs", "blobbies") can be used to model fluids.