Advanced Graphics
2007–08

Principal lecturer: Dr Neil Dodgson
Taken by: Part II
Syllabus
Past exam questions are in two different places: 98, 99, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07 and 00, 01
Lecture notes (4.7 MB PDF).
An introduction to the surface representations used in CAD (864 kB PDF).
Subdivision curves & surfaces (618 kB PDF)
new Solution notes to some exam questions

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.
• 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.

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.

Implicits and CSG

• I used Brian Wyvill's presentation in the lectures. There is a PDF of the relevant slides. Brian's whole presentation is also available from the University of Calgary's web server.
• 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

• Mass-spring A physics demonstrator showing a mass-spring system in action; an applet demonstrating Euler's method; MyPhysicsLab explanation of the Runge-Kutta algorithm which is used in most of their physics simulations; an applet that compares Euler, Improved Euler, and Runge-Kutta graphically; Clothy - a simple mass spring cloth simulator
• Water simulations Water simulations
  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.
• Kass and Miller's 1990 SIGGRAPH paper on which the above water simulations were based (scanned version of the paper for people outside the cam.ac.uk domain)
• Blobbies for water Animations demonstrating how implicit surfaces ("metaballs", "blobbies") can be used to model fluids.