In Fall 2024, CS 418 Interactive Computer Graphics
is being
offered in a way designed specifically to cater to our online MCS
program. As such, both in-person and online students will be expected to
consume course material in an asynchronous digital form. Office hours
will also be held online, are optional, and will be the only synchronous
component of the course.
How to get access to the course in Coursera
After enrolling in the course at the university, there’s a
several-step process for getting your enrollment copied into Coursera.
Notably, there are emails generated the day after you enroll you need to
read and an onboarding course
you have to complete on Coursera
before CS 418 will show up. See this
guide for more.
The course consists of the following components:
Available on the course content site, these have roughly the same content as the videos, but often differ in level of detail. Some video content (such as coding demonstrations) have no corresponding notes.
Please make notes of questions as you read them and post those questions on CampusWire. I may answer them there or write up longer explanations and post them as supplementary content.
Lecture material is split into modules, each with a quiz. These quizzes are intended primarily as a self-assessment of learning and may be retaken as often as desired.
I understand that some students find quizzes annoying, but experience has shown me they they do help students find and fix gaps in understanding.
These quizzes are administereed on Coursera. You can activate your Illinois Coursera account as described in https://online.illinois.edu/online-courses/moocs/private and then visit https://www.coursera.org/learn/cs418-interactive-computer-graphics/home to access quizzes.
There are five primary MPs, plus a sixth one required for 4-credit students but not required for 3-credit students. There are also two low-weight warm-ups intended primarily to smooth the way for subsequent MPs.
Machine problems are submitted on a custom course submission site
that provides some limited automated feedback (mostly of the form did
it run on our server
); they are graded primarily by hand.
I expect each MP to take the average student between 10 and 20 hours to complete.
The 4cr MP typically takes a bit longer than the others, so 4cr students may wish to begin it early by viewing the raytracing videos and notes earlier than the 3cr schedule recommends.
Computer graphics studies how computers can create images. Interactive computer graphics creates images quickly enough that a new image can be created in response to every user action. In principle any image-creation algorithm could be interactive, given adequate hardware, but in practice it usually refers to a specific family of workflows involving the interaction of the CPU and GPU. That family of workflows will be our primary topic in this class.
This course teaches the following in enough detail to implement them yourself:
This course teaches various other topics at a lower level of detail, including:
This course does not teach
My goal in this class is that you learn. As it is an elective, I hope most of you are taking it for the same reason. But I do have a duty to assign grades, so here’s how we’ll do it.
| Weight | Assessment |
|---|---|
| 70% | MPs |
| 30% | Quizzes |
Numbers are converted to letters linearly with the A−/B+ cut-off at 90% and the C−/D+ cutoff at 70%; more precisely
const letter_grade = (percentage_earned) => {
if (percentage_earned <= 60) return 'F'
let letter = 'DCBA'[Math.floor(percentage_earned/10 - 6)]
if (letter != 'A' && percentage_earned % 10 > 20/3) letter += '+'
if (percentage_earned % 10 < 10/3) letter += '-'
return letter
}MP points come in two groups: core and elective. Core MP components are mostly things that every graphics students should know, with some additions that are prerequisite for many other tasks. Elective MP components go beyond the minimum, and you’ll get to pick and chose which ones you do. The number of MP points of each type you will need, together with a list of MPs, can be found on the MPs overview page
Collaboration includes
My goal in this course is not to have you create working solutions (I already have working solutions, I wrote them before the course began) but rather to have you learn enough to be able to create your own working solutions. As such, you may collaborate on MPs but must obey the following limitations on your collaboration:
Do not collaborate on quizzes; limit your sources to course material, other pre-made content, and your own work.
Quizzes have unlimited retakes. Please still think about each question rather than just randomly guessing.
Type all code yourself; no copy-paste or AI-typed code from others.
Design and understand all your code.
If you use any source, pre-existing or dynamic, that was not provided by this course in writing code, cite that source in a comment in your code.
Listed prereqs in the course catalog are
Needed for
Needed for
We will discuss using large sparse matrices to represent systems of equations and variants of conjugate gradient to solve them. That is rarely usable at interactive speeds, so we won’t talk about then in much detail in this class.
Needed for
There is some calculus in graphics, but mostly as theoretic background for algorithms that do not themselves use the calculus. We’ll not need any integral-solving or related by-hand calculus computations in this course.
Analysis of past student performance leads us to identify the following as optional but recommended prerequisites:
This is a programming-heavy course, and these courses provide valuable extra training an experience with programming.
We also deal with how the CPU and GPU interact, a topic made much easier if you have had prior computer systems training.
| Name | Luther Tychonievich |
| Office | 2340 Siebel |
| Phone | +1 217 333 8609 |
luthert@...Include 418or graphicsin the subject line |
Sean Koo, Ben Guan, Arthur Wang
This is a smaller staff of assistants than I’ve had in the past. As such, there may be fewer help hours than you’d otherwise hope; if you generally use instructor or assistant help in most programming assignments, this course may not be ideal for you this semester.
| Schedule | |
| Location | Zoom meeting 853 6085 8537 passcode 418 |
Readings are hosted for free on https://cs418.cs.illinois.edu. There is no other textbook required.