CS 636 - Advanced Rendering Techniques

Spring 2020

Description: The creation of realistic images from 3D models is central to the development of computer graphics. The ray tracing algorithm has become one of the most popular and powerful techniques for creating photo-realistic images. Ray tracing's simplicity, elegance and ease of implementation make it one of the most important image generation algorithms in computer graphics. This class will explore in detail the algorithmic components of ray tracing.

These include

• Object representations
• Object-ray intersections
• Viewing/camera models
• Shading models
• Reflection & refraction models
• Acceleration techniques
• 2D/3D texture mapping
• Anti-aliasing & filtering
• Participating media

Students will implement many of these components in their class programming projects.

Other types of rendering algorithms will be discussed, e.g. radiosity, volume rendering, non-photorealistic rendering and photon mapping.

Location - Online

Time - Wednesday, 6:00 PM → 8:50 PM

Instructor

Dr. David Breen
david AT cs.drexel.edu


Office Hours - By appointment via zoom

Textbooks

Recommended

• Ray Tracing from the Ground Up, Kevin Suffern, AK Peters, 2007, ISBN: 978-1-56881-272-4

Supplemental

• An Introduction to Ray Tracing, Andrew S. Glassner (ed.), Morgan Kaufmann, 1989, ISBN: 978-0122861604

Grade

• Programming Assignments - 90%
• Final Exam - 10%

I intend to use the standard grading scale of 100→ 90 (A), 89→ 80 (B), 79→ 70 (C), 69→ 60 (D), else (F).
Please also note that incompletes will not be given for this course.

Assignments

Each assignment is worth 10 points.

Post several (at least 3) images generated from each assignment to a web site.

Make sure that your images and the objects in your images are big enough to see/evaluate the effect implemented in each assignment.
Your images should leave no doubt that you have implemented a particular feature correctly.

Programming assignments may be written in any language. But student experience has shown that interpreted languages, e.g. python, are too slow and inefficient for the serious numerical computing needed to do ray tracing.

Collect and submit all of the needed source files for an assignment in a single zip file.

Include a README file that says what source files and which lines contain the code that implements the central feature for that assignment.
I will be looking over your code, instead of trying to run it, in order to grade the assignments.

You can use ImageMagick to read/write images.

Follow all of the instructions listed in the assignments.
5 points will be subtracted from an assignment if all of the instructions aren't followed.

Assignments are due at 11:59PM on the due date. Well, ... I will honor the vampire rule.
  Post images on the web and code on Bb Learn.
  E-mail me the URL.

Late Policy

• One point off per day late, up to a maximum of 5 points.
• All regular assignments due at 11:59 PM on June 8th.
• No Incompletes!

• Programming Assignment 1 - Basic ray tracer with spheres and triangle meshes
  • Due April 19th
• Programming Assignment 2 - Add diffuse/specular shading model with point lights
  • Due April 26th
• Programming Assignment 3 - Add an acceleration technique
  • Due May 10th
• Programming Assignment 4 - Add adaptive supersampling/anti-aliasing
  • Due May 17th
• Programming Assignment 5 - Add shadows
  • Due May 24th
• Programming Assignment 6 - Add reflections
  • Due May 31st
• Programming Assignment 7 - Add refractions
  • Due June 8th
• Extra Credit Assignment - Add 2D and 3D texture mapping, more primitives and directional lights
  • Due June 12th

It is expected that you will do you own work, i.e. write your own software for the assignments.
You cannot "borrow" code from other students or download programs from the Internet.
Specifically, you cannot use the code provided by the Suffern or Shirley books (or their derivatives) for your assignments.

Any student violating this policy will be given an 'F' for the class.

You may use image and basic math libraries, e.g. for storing and manipulating vectors and matrices.

Final Exam

There will be a final exam on material not covered by the regular assignments.

Topics covered on the final exam are

• Radiosity
• Photon Mapping
• BRDFs
• Ray Tracing CSG models
• Volume Rendering
• Spot Lights
• Sampling and Reconstruction
• Texture Mapping
• Procedural Textures
• Perlin Noise and Turbulence Functions
• Non-Photorealistic Rendering

Questions related to these topics will be in a short-answer format.

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Class Schedule

Week 1 - 4/8/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 1, 2, 3, 8 & 9
• Read Glassner: Chapters 1, 2 & 7
• Related paper
  • T. Whitted, "An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 23, No. 6, June 1980, pp. 343-349
• Lecture Topics - Class Logistics, Ray Tracing Fundamentals, Intersection Algorithms
  • Lecture slides 6 / page
• Programming Assignment 1 - Basic ray tracer with spheres and triangle meshes

Week 2 - 4/15/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 13, 14 & 15
• Related paper
  • D. Warn, "Lighting Controls for Synthetic Images," ACM Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '83 Proceedings), 1983, pp. 13-21
• Lecture Topics - Color, Light and Shading Models
• Programming Assignment 2 - Add diffuse/specular shading model with point lights
• Assignment 1 due 4/19/20

Week 3 - 4/22/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 19, 21 & 22
• Read Glassner: Chapter 6
• Lecture Topics - Acceleration Techniques
  • Lecture slides 6 / page
• Programming Assignment 3 - Add an acceleration technique
• Assignment 2 due 4/26/20

Week 4 - 4/29/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 18, 20, 21 & 26
• Read Glassner: Chapter 3
• Related papers
  • S.D. Roth, "Ray casting for modeling solids," Computer Graphics and Image Processing, 18(2):109-144,
  • D. Greenberg, M. Cohen and K. Torrance, "Radiosity: A method for computing global illumination," The Visual Computer, 2(5):291--7, September 1986.
  • M. Cohen and D. Greenberg, "The hemi-cube: a radiosity solution for complex environments," ACM Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '85 Proceedings), Vol. 19, No. 3, July 1985, pp. 34-40
  • M. Cohen, S.E. Chen, J.R. Wallace and D. Greenberg, "A progressive refinement approach to fast radiosity image generation," ACM Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '88 Proceedings), Vol. 22, No. 4, August 1985, pp. 75-84
  • H. Wann Jensen , "Global Illumination using Photon Maps ," Proc. 7th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, 1996, pp. 21-30
• Lecture Topics -
  • Transformations and CSG
    • Lecture slides 6 / page
  • Radiosity
    • Lecture slides 6 / page
  • Photon Mapping
  • BRDFs
    • Lecture slides 6 / page

Week 5 - 5/6/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 4, 5, 6 & 7
• Read Glassner: Chapter 5
• Lecture Topics - Sampling & Anti-aliasing
• Programming Assignment 4 - Add adaptive supersampling/anti-aliasing
• Assignment 3 due 5/10/20

Week 6 - 5/13/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 16, 17, 24, 25, 27 & 28
• Read Glassner: Chapter 4
• Related paper
  • R. Hall and D. Greenberg, "A testbed for realistic image synthesis," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 3, No. 8, November 1983, 10-20.
• Lecture Topics - Hall Shading Model
  • Lecture slides 6 / page
• Programming Assignment 5 - Add shadows
• Assignment 4 due 5/17/20

Week 7 - 5/20/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 29
• Related paper
  • P. Heckbert, "Survey of Texture Mapping," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 6, No. 11, Nov. 1986, pp. 56-67
• Lecture Topics - 2D Texture Mapping
• Programming Assignment 6 - Add reflections
• Assignment 5 due 5/24/20

Week 8 - 5/27/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 30 & 31
• Related paper
  • K. Perlin, "An Image Synthesizer," Proc. SIGGRAPH '85, July 1985, pp. 287 - 296
• Lecture Topics - Procedural & 3D Texture Mapping
  • Lecture slides 6 / page
• Programming Assignment 7 - Add refractions
• Assignment 6 due 5/31/20

Week 9 - 6/3/20

• Read Suffern: Chapters 10, 11 & 12
• Read Glassner: Chapter 3
• Related papers
  • R.A. Drebin, L. Carpenter, and P. Hanrahan, "Volume Rendering," ACM Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '88 Proceedings), 1988, pp. 65-74
  • G. Kindlmann and J. Durkin, "Semi-automatic generation of transfer functions for direct volume rendering," Proc. 1998 IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization, 1998, pp. 79-86
  • L. Westover, "Footprint evaluation for volume rendering," Proc. SIGGRAPH, 1990, pp. 367-376
  • K. Mueller et al., "Splatting errors and antialiasing," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 178-191, 1997
  • P. Lacroute and M. Levoy, "Fast Volume Rendering Using a Shear-Warp Factorization of the Viewing Transformation," Proc. SIGGRAPH, 1994, pp. 451-458
  • SIGGRAPH 99 Course: Non-Photorealistic Rendering
• Non-Photorealistic Rendering Publications
• Lecture Topics - Volume Rendering
  • Lecture slides 6 / page
• Lecture Topics - Non-photorealistic Rendering
• Assignment 7 due 6/8/20
• Extra credit assignment due 6/12/20

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Last modified on June 2, 2020.