Further Graphics

Aims

The course introduces fundamental concepts of modern graphics pipelines.

Lectures

The order and content of lectures is provisional and subject to change.

• Geometry Representations. Parametric surfaces, implicit surfaces, meshes, point-set surfaces, geometry processing pipeline. [1 lecture]
• Discrete Differential Geometry. Surface normal and curvature, Laplace-Beltrami operator, heat diffusion. [1 lecture]
• Geometry Processing.  Parametrization, filtering, 3D capture. [1 lecture]
• Animation I. Animation types, animation pipeline, rigging/skinning, character animation. [1 lecture]
• Animation II. Blending transformations, pose-space animation, controllers. [1 lecture]
• The Rendering Equation. Radiosity, reflection models, BRDFs, local vs. global illumination. [1 lecture]
• Distributed Ray Tracing. Quadrature, importance sampling, recursive ray tracing. [1 lecture]
• Inverse Rendering. Differentiable rendering, inverse problems. [1 lecture]

Objectives

On completing the course, students should be able to

• understand and use fundamental 3D geometry/scene representations and operations;
• learn animation techniques and controls;
• learn how light transport is modeled and simulated in rendering;
• understand how graphics and rendering can be used to solve computer perception problems.

Recommended reading

Students should expect to refer to one or more of these books, but should not find it necessary to purchase any of them.

• Shirley, P. and Marschner, S. (2009). Fundamentals of Computer Graphics. CRC Press (3rd ed.).
• Watt, A. (2000). 3D Computer Graphics. Addison-Wesley (3rd ed).
• Hughes, van Dam, McGuire, Skalar, Foley, Feiner and Akeley (2013). Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. Addison-Wesley (3rd edition)
• Akenine-Möller, et. al. (2018). Real-time rendering. CRC Press (4th ed.).