Course Websites

Advanced methods for representing, displaying, and rendering two-, three-, and four-dimensional scenes. General algebraic curves and surfaces, splines, Gaussian and bump-function representation, fractals, particle systems, constructive solid geometry methods, lighting models, radiosity, advanced ray-tracing methods, surface texturing animation techniques, data visualization methods. Course Information: 3 undergraduate hours. 3 or 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: CS 418.

Ray Tracing from the Ground Up by Kevin Suffern. A. K. Peters, Ltd., Natick, MA, USA.

And various SIGGRAPH Course Notes for more recent advances.

Be able to explain principles of rendering using traced rays, from basic raytracers through pathtracing. (1)(3)
Implement a geometric data structure to accelerate ray-tracing. Undertsand and be able to explain the trade-offs between using a uniform grid, a bounding volume hierarchy, and a kd-tree.(1)(2)(6)
Implement simple ray-traced renderers, including pathtracers. (1)(2)(6)
Know basic radiometric ideas, including definition of and units for radiance, radiosity and exitance and employ them to maintain physically correct lighting in a ray-tracer (1)(2)(6)
Know and implement example-based methods to synthesize (render) textures. (1)(2)(6)
Understand and implement current procedural animation ideas (1)(2)(6)

Ray tracing
Distributed ray tracing
KD Trees
Radiometry
Path tracing
Irradiance Caching
High Dynamic Range Imaging
Bidirectional path tracing
Texture synthesis
Compositing
Image based rendering
Basic ideas in animation
Inverse kinematics
Procedural animation
Human animation and motion graphs
Physical models in animation

Revisions in last 6 years	Approximately when revision was done	Reason for revision	Data or documentation available?
Reduced discussion of photon maps, finite element radiosity	fall 2010	Importance of topics minor compared to those introduced	Professional judgement
Significantly increased discussion of image based rendering, introduced exercises using open-source production tools (rather than coding by students)	spring 2012	Students cannot write sufficiently complex rendering codes in reasonable time to get a sense of issues in production rendering; they need to use tools as well	professional judgement

Selected Elective.