This course covers advanced topics in graphics and related technologies with a strong hands-on and interactive focus. Topics include: advanced features of OpenGL; real-time shadows and reflection techniques; real-time lighting techniques; advanced modelling and animation techniques; modelling rotations; detailed surface models; performance optimisation; radiosity; ray tracing and optimisations; Monte Carlo and metropolis rendering; graphics hardware; and computational geometry.
COMP3421 is a necessary prerequisite. You should have at least a credit-level performance in COMP3421. You should have experience with OpenGL and either C or Java.
The syllabus consists of two main strands:
This part of the curriculum explores real-time polygonal rendering for applications such as visualisation of interactive scenes, virtual worlds, and entertainment. This part of the curriculum shows how to implement realistic effects using OpenGL. It includes the following topic areas:
This part of the course gathers together several different strands: how complex structures and animations are modelled for graphics; rendering techniques where real-time performance is not required; and some introductory computational geometry and its application to problems in graphics. It covers:
Graphics contains a wealth of interesting subtopics. Not all of them can be examined, but if there is time, and demand from students, we may also examine the following topics:
There is no standard text for the course; since the topic areas are diverse and ever-changing; they are not covered in a single book.
Good references for the course are:
There will be a single lecture of Advanced Graphics on Thursday evenings from 6pm to 9pm in Quad G031. There will be no tutorials. Any tutorial material will be covered in lecture time.
We also hope to invite guest speakers from companies like Microforte (a games company, responsible for instance for the Fallout: Tactics game) and Animal Logic (a special effects company that was involved, for instance, in the production of The Matrix).
We may also be arranging labs with modelling tools. Right now, on the agenda is Blender, POVRay, POVLab and BMRT, VirTools and Maya; but we'd like to add to this list.
You will be given the following additional facilities:
Please contact us if you find that these resources are not adequate.
Tim Lambert (email: lambert) and Waleed Kadous (email: waleed) will be co-lecturing the course. Waleed will be covering advanced polygonal techniques and Tim will be covering the advanced modelling, rendering and geometry section.
There will be three assessable tasks:
Will be on advanced OpenGL and an exploration of optimisation techniques. Will be available in week 3 and due in week 6. It will be worth 10 per cent of your assessment. It should take approximately 15 hours to complete.
The course will consist of a software project of the student's choosing. It can be a game, a visualisation tool, a modelling tool or a renderer of a particular phenomenon (e.g. particles, birds etc). The timeline for the course is:
The projects will be assessed on originality, technical aptitude, completeness, usability and quality of code. You may attempt the project in groups if you so wish. It is worth 40 per cent of your assessment, including 5 per cent for your proposal. You may borrow code from other projects and sources, but you must acknowledge the source and the work must be mostly your own.
The examination will be open book and will be worth 50 per cent of the assessment. It will be a 24-hour take home exam.
All marks will be added up directly. No harmonic mean will be applied.
For this subject, as in all subjects in the Department of Computer Science, assignments must be substantially your own work. Assignments are submitted on-line (that is, to a central account on the computer), and all submissions are routinely subject to scrutiny for similarities with other students' assignments. If you copy from another person, or get an unreasonable amount of help from a friend (so your assignment begins to look like theirs), or if you work very closely with someone, or, if you download and use software from the Web without acknowledgement there is a good chance we will detect it. When we do, you will be penalised. At the very least, you will lose some or all marks for that assignment. In the past, students have been automatically failed for submitting stolen assignments. Further details are given in the first section of the UNIX Primer.
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