Schedule

The following schedule will be updated frequently with reference material and a more precise indication of what has been covered in class. Please note that the slides available for this website are slightly different from the ones used in class since the latter have more explanatory material. The topics for future leactures are here only as indication and can (will) change. The readings are refererences to the list given below.

date	topic	readings	out	due
Sep 22	Introduction \| Images	introduction \| images
Sep 27	Raytracing I	raytracing I \| shading I	Hw1
Sep 29	Raytracing I	raytracing I \| shading I	Ray I
Oct 4	Tansformations	linear alg. \| transforms
Oct 6	Tansformations \| Viewing	transforms \| viewing	Hw2	Hw1
Oct 11	Viewing \| Modeling	viewing \| modeling
Oct 13	Meshes \| Curves	meshes \| curves	Model	Ray I
Oct 18	Surfaces \| Subdiv	surfaces \| subdivision
Oct 20	Animation	animation	Hw3	Hw2
Oct 25	Animation	animation
Oct 27	Animation	animation	Anim	Model
Nov 1	Graphics Pipeline	pipeline
Nov 3	Graphics Pipeline \| Texturing	texturing	Hw4	Hw3
Nov 8	Using the Graphics Pipeline
Nov 10	Raytracing II \| Monte Carlo Integration	montecarlo	Ray II	Anim
Nov 15	Distribution Ray Tracing	dist. raytracing
Nov 17	Rendering Equation \| Path Tracing	rendering equation \| path tracing	Hw5	Hw4
Nov 22	TBD
Nov 24	--- Thanksgiving ---
Nov 29	Wrapup			Ray II, Hw5

Readings

background	Shirley, Ch. 2, Ch. 5
	A review of mathematical concepts we will be using in class. We will not be covering this in details in class, but I will quickly review some topics as they come up. You might want to read this carefully if this material is new to you since we will be using it quite a bit during the course. Topics range from trigonometry, parametric representations, points and vectors and linear algebra.
introduction	Shirley, Ch. 1.1-1.8.1
	A basic introduction to computer graphics and some practicalities for implementing the algorithms. Please ignore the C++ descriptions.
images	Shirley, Ch. 3.1-3.4
	A very basic introduction to digital images and compositing.
raytracing I	Shirley, Ch. 10.1-10.7
	Basic raytracing: viewing rays generation, object intersection(sphere, triangle and polygon), shadows, reflection and refraction. We will not cover in detail the ray-polygon intersection.
shading I	Shirley, Ch. 9
	Basic surface shading with a difression on non-photorealistic models for art and illustration.
linear algebra	Shirley, Ch. 5
	Linear algebra review. Don't bother too much about inverse computation, eigenvalues and SVD.
transforms	Shirley, Ch. 6
	2D and 3D geometric transformations.
viewing	Shirley, Ch. 7
	Viewing transformations. Do not try to memorize the matrices given, but concentrate on the concepts introduced. We will be looking at a simpler version of the matrices in class, so this chapter is good to look at the full formulation.
meshes	Shirley, Ch. 13.1-13.2
	A quick introduction to some of the common mesh data structures.
curves and surfaces	Shirley, Ch. 15
	A fairly in-depth review of curves, but not much on surfaces.
subdivision	Zorin and Schroder, Ch. 1-3
	A very in-depth course on subdivision surfaces. You sould only skim trhough this quickly. A full copy of the course can be found at http://mrl.nyu.edu/publications/subdiv-course2000/
animation	Shirley, Ch. 16
	A non-technical introduction to animation. A bit lacking in mathematical details.
pipeline	Shirley, Ch. 3.5-3.7, Ch. 8, Ch. 12
	An introduction to the various algorithms used in the graphics pipeline.
texturing	Shirley, Ch. 14
	An introduction to texturing; covers more details on 3d textures than we have done in class.
raytracing II	Shirley, Ch. 10.8-10.9
	Support for hierarchies and sub-linear intersection for raytracing.
montecalro	Shirley, Ch. 14
	Introduction to Monte Carlo integration.
distribution ray tracing	Shirley, Ch. 10.11
	Distribution ray tracing.
rendering equation	Shirley, Ch. 19, Ch. 24
	Introduction to the rendering equation and reflection models. Uses a notation very different than ours that might be a bit confusing in some places.
path tracing	Shirley, Ch. 25
	Introduction to global illumination methods. Goes into more details on how to accurately compute direct lighting.