Computer Laboratory > Teaching > Course material 2008–09 > Advanced Graphics

Advanced Graphics
2008–09

Principal lecturer: Dr Alex Benton
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 and source code

Note about the demos: Several of the PowerPoint slideshows above use Microsoft's ActiveX Web Control to embed local web pages into the slideshow. Each such demo is linked separately above but if you would like to download all of the HTML files for the demos and see them in the context of the PowerPoint slides, then you should download this .zip file and place its contents in a folder named 'demos' at the same level as where you've locally saved the PowerPoint slides.

I recommend viewing the javascript demos in Chrome or Firefox 3 for best performance.

Exercises

Useful web sites

Really good books

Watt, A. (1999). 3D Computer Graphics. Addison-Wesley (3rd ed).
Foley, J.D., van Dam, A., Feiner, S.K. & Hughes, J.F. (1990). Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).
de Berg, M., Cheong, O., van Kreveld, M. & Overmars, M. (2008). Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications. Springer (3rd ed.).
Rost, R. (2006). OpenGL Shading Language. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed).

General

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

OpenGL

OpenGL.org, the central site for OpenGL including ample documentation
Neon Helium Productions, hosting an excellent set of GL tutorials

Ray tracing

Geoff Wyvill, Practical Ray Tracing - Part One, University of Otago (1995)
Geoff Wyvill, Practical Ray Tracing - Part Two, University of Otago (1995)
A gallery of ray traced images at ART.
Software to play with:
- A simple javascript ray tracer, compiled from Java with the Google Web Toolkit.
- An applet which demonstrates how the ray tracing algorithm works.
- POV-Ray, an oft-used shareware package
- Rayshade at Stanford

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 is a good compliment to 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

Brian Wyvill's presentation on implicit surfaces from the University of Calgary.
HyperFun - a modelling package which uses implicit surfaces as its principal modelling primitive.
Several applets from Neil Dodgson:
To see the Java source code, replace .html with .java in the hyperlinks.
A number of striking animations demonstrating how implicit surfaces can be used to model fluids.

Global Illumination Schemes

The colour images from Buss chapter XI are available as a PDF. (327kB)
Henrik Jensen's homepage has many references to photon mapping, including his early paper on the topic (1996).

Advanced Graphics2008–09