by Eftychios Sifakis on September 3, 2020
Dear Students,
Welcome to CS559 “Introduction to Computer Graphics”. This web page (along with our online Piazza forum) will be your portal for all announcements related to the class, information about class logistics, and repository of lecture notes and supplemental information.
To get started, make sure to check out the Syllabus page for the most important general class information (including grading and administrative logistics), and the Calendar for a time-indexed view of topics and important special scheduling notices.
IMPORTANT NOTE ON IN-PERSON vs. REMOTE ATTENDANCE: As detailed in this Piazza post only one-third of the enrolled students will be allowed to attend in-person lectures in each day that the class meets. See the Calendar for a time-indexed view of which subset of the class is allowed to attend in person. All others (including waitlisted students) should attend remotely, via live-stream or by viewing the recorded lectures asynchronously (again, read this post).
UPDATE : ALL IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE HAS BEEN SUSPENDED FROM SEPTEMBER 10-25, AS REFLECTED IN THE CLASS CALENDAR.
You will be getting information on reading materials as we go, but if you want to prefetch some information that will definitely be useful, take a look at the following tutorials/discussions:
That should be a good starting point! Please keep track of the posted deadlines for assignments (via Canvas; postings on this forum and/or Piazza will also be made to announce rollout of assignments). Also, make sure to verify you have access to the Piazza and Canvas pages (see the Syllabus page). Have a great start to your semester and enjoy the class!
by Eftychios Sifakis on December 9, 2020
As was the case for your midterm, the primary resource for your review would be the online lectures, lecture slides and whiteboard notes; you should be able to fully perform in the final exam with the information communicated to you in the lectures. That being said, the following references might be useful to you, especially if you feel you would welcome reading about the material we covered from a structured textbook as well.
From Foundations of Computer Graphics :
- From Chapter 4 [Link] : The most relevant sections are : Introduction, Section 4.1, 4.5, 4.8.
- From Chapter 8 [Link] : Focus on Sections 8.1 (mostly subsection 8.1.2), 8.2, and 8.3.
- From Chapter 11 [Link] : This is all good information. You may skip 11.1, and 11.3.1. For sections 11.4 through 11.7 don’t worry about the formulas.
From The Big Fun Graphics Book :
- From Chapter 15 [Link] : All good material – you may skip Section 15.2. The explanations are more technical and in-depth than what we covered in class; don’t worry about this, for the exam you will just need the depth of exposition we covered in lectures.
- From Chapter 16 [Link] : This is all useful and accessible (too bad the chapter is incomplete!). Again, this gets more technical with deeper mathematical foundations of the techniques, which is informative if you want to understand more about the concepts, but just the level of coverage we had in our lectures will be well sufficient for the exam.
From Real Time Rendering :
- Chapter 6 [Link] is a fantastic reference for texturing, although it includes substantially more detail than we covered in class (or needed for your exam). It’s a great read if you want to learn more about these techniques though. You can very safely skip Summed Area Tables (p. 167) and Anisotropic Filtering (p. 168), as well as Sections 6.2.3, 6.2.5, 6.2.6, 6.3 (interesting, but we didn’t cover it in class), 6.4, 6.5, 6.6., 6.7.4 and 6.7.5.
Our discussion of global illumination and ray tracing is restricted (for the purposes of the exam) to just the information included in the Dec 8th lecture and associated slides.
