CS 381 - Topics in Computer Graphics

Meets TR 2-3:30 PM Room 107 Chapman Building University of Alaska Fairbanks

CS F381-F01 (#71217) 3.0 Credits, Fall 2006 Prerequisites: CS 202 (Programming) Recommended: CS 314 (Linear Algebra)

Instructor: Dr. O. Lawlor ffosl@uaf.edu, 474-7678 Office: 210C Chapman, 2-3 MF (Plus!)

Recommended Textbook: Interactive Computer Graphics, 4th Ed., by Edward Angel, Addison-Wesley ($112.50 at UAF bookstore; $100 on Amazon). The 3rd edition is also acceptable.

ADA Compliance: Will work with Office of Disabilities Services (203 WHIT, 474-7043) to provide reasonable accomodation to students with disabilities.

Course Website: http://www.cs.uaf.edu/2006/fall/cs381/

Announcements

• Final course grades are posted on NetRun and on UAOnline.
• Please turn in your Project Final Code here by Monday, December 11 at midnight.
• The final exam will be at *1pm* *Wednesday*, December 13, in the usual room Bunnell 124. It'll be the usual: closed book, closed notes, comprehensive, but with emphasis on the post-miderm stuff. Study the Lecture Notes and sample code; topics will include:
  • Lighting: diffuse, specular, and combinations.
  • Shadows: shadow volumes (extrude silhouttes and increment/decrement stencil buffer), shadow maps (rasterize depth to light source and compare in fragment shader), projected and decal shadows (fake shadows by casting to ground), and raytraced shadows (in shadow if anything lies along the ray from hit point to light source).
  • Textures: textures to dress up geometry, textures as lookup tables, textures generated by rendering and readback, texture coordinate perturbation (e.g., parallax maps), and the basic texturing OpenGL interface.
  • Geometry: geometry input files (e.g., SMF files), geometry representation (vertex and triangle arrays), and geometry in graphics hardware.
• I've graded your project rough drafts--there's some darn cool stuff in there! Please read your grade and my comments on NetRun.
• Check out the pixel-shader raytracing example program (Zip, Tar-gzip), or the version with Snell and Fresnel refraction (Zip, Tar-gzip).
• Plan to give a 10-minute talk on your project next week. Project presentation schedule is alphabetical by email address:

  Tuesday, December 5th: Boyer, Devin Barnes, Daniel Nash, George Schamel, Jay Valcic, Lovro

  Thursday, December 7th: Raskovic, Natasa Swanson, Paul Gillmore, Russell Hawley, Raymund Veazey, Travis

• Turn in your Proj2 Rough Draft by Tuesday, November 28 midnight.
• Geometry-reading object example program (Zip, Tar-gzip). You can also download a .smf geometry and texture image of my head, scanned on a cyberware scanner at UIUC (Zip, Tar-gzip). Finally, I've also got a *geometry-modifying* example program (Zip, Tar-gzip) that does a very poor job of mesh simplification (contract random triangles) and mesh subdivision (subdividing each triangle).
• HW6 key is posted (Zip, Tar-gzip).
• I've graded your project proposals; they do look quite fun! Please read your Project 1 comments on NetRun. Upcoming project deadlines include:
  • A rough draft of the code, that compiles and runs, but isn't necessarily totally polished, will be due Tuesday, November 28 right after Thanksgiving break.
  • The last week of class, December 5 & 7, I'd like you to present your projects in class.
  • The final, working project code will be due Friday December 8.
• You can download all tiny examples for texture objects, framebuffer objects, and GLSL compilation outside of OGL here (Zip, Tar-gzip).
• Check out my compute-a-texture and readback program (Zip, Tar-gzip). Depending on the fragment program, this program can do some darn cool stuff:
  • Rotate-and-blur feedback, similar to the Windows Media Player. (shaders/move_down/, or the weirder shaders/crazy_fract/).
  • Gas dynamics simulation (shaders/gas_good/).
  • Ice solidification simulation (shaders/ice/).
  • Reaction-diffusion equations (shaders/gray_scott/, or the more finicky shaders/turk_turing/).
  • Shallow-water wave equations (shaders/fluid_good/).
• HW6 is posted, on shadows, and is due Thursday, November 9th.
• Check out my shadow program (Zip, Tar-gzip). (Updated Thursday, Nov 2 at 5pm to fix a linker error.)
• Check out my little parallax mapping demo (Zip, Tar-gzip).
• Midterm and overall course grades are posted on NetRun. The midterm grades were curved just a bit; your midterm grade is 102 percent minus twice the number of missed points. I've also added a "Overall (Best case)" column, showing your overall course grade assuming you make perfect grades for the rest of the semester. If your current overall grade is under 50%, or if it's now mathematically impossible for you to even get a C, then you might consider dropping the course before the Withdrawal deadline this Friday.
• Proj1, the project topic, is due Tuesday, October 31 at midnight.
• The course midterm will be Thursday, October 19 at the usual class time and place. It will be an in-class exam, not a take-home. I recommend you read over the old homeworks, class lecture notes, and example programs.
• HW5 is on lighting, and it's due Friday, October *20th* at midnight. I had initially mistakenly said Friday, October 13th. That's insane.
• Grades and comments for HW1-HW4 are posted on NetRun.
• Here's a bare-metal OpenGL-only texturing application (Zip, Tar-gzip). It does NOT use GLSL, GLEW, GLUI, or the ogl routines.
• Check out the textured-rendering OpenGL program 'texture' (Zip, Tar-gzip). (2pm Wednesday, October 11: included 256x256 texture file.)
• I've finally gotten specular highlights working properly, and I've written a little "glsl_lighting" program to demonstrate them (Zip, Tar-gzip). (6pm Wednesday October 4: fixed Windows binary. 6pm Thursday October 5: fixed negative "cameraLoc", and added a few examples.)
• HW4 is on lighting, and it's due Thursday, October 5th at midnight.
• HW4 Key
• Check out the point-line-poly-rendering OpenGL program 'primitives' (Zip, Tar-gzip). It's also purdy.
• Check out the GPU-fractal-rendering OpenGL program mandel (Zip, Tar-gzip). It's purdy.
• HW3 uses glsl_bare, and it's due Thursday, September 28 at midnight.
• You can now actually compile the OpenGL program glsl_bare (Zip, Tar-gzip).
• HW2 Key
• HW2 is due Thursday, September 14th at midnight.
• ROOM CHANGE: Since Chapman 107 is so small, we'll now meet in Bunnell 124. That's the basement of the building attached to Schaibel Auditorium.
• Download and try out the "rotate 2D array of points with GLSL" program I showed in class, for Windows and Linux (Zip, Tar-gzip).
• Download and try out the "move big 2D array of points around with GLSL" program I showed in class, for Windows and Linux (Zip, Tar-gzip). Warning: needs a good graphics card!
• HW1 Key
• HW1 due Tuesday, September 5th in class.
• The first day of class is Thursday, April 31, at 2pm.

Resources

• Lecture notes, in blog format.
  
• Course grades are posted on NetRun.
• Blackboard will be used to turn in most homeworks.
• Syllabus for course

Reference Material

• The OpenGL Shader Language Specification is the main thing to read. The C interface is described in the ARB_shader_objects spec. The actual underlying hardware operations are described in the ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program specs.
• The official OpenGL 1.4 Specification is almost unreadable legalese, but sometimes is the only way to tell what a given OpenGL call really does.
• Getting OpenGL running fast is my little guide to fast graphics hardware and software.
  
• NeHe has the definitive set of OpenGL tutorial code. He doesn't cover programmability very heavily.
• OpenGL.org has a good compendium of documentation and links for OpenGL. Also see Steve Baker's notes.
  
• gpgpu.org, a research news site for new and interesting uses of graphics hardware. Also see shadertech.
  
• U. Wisconsin Graphics Qual, an excellent collection of good graphics papers.
• OpenGL utilities:
  
• GLUT or FreeGLUT, for cross-platform OpenGL startup and basic interface utility routines.
  
• GLEW, for managing OpenGL extensions like ARB_FRAGMENT_PROGRAM.
• Apple's MacOS X OpenGL Profiler, for determining OpenGL performance bottlenecks.
  

Compiling OpenGL Code

• For Windows, you can use a bunch of different compilers:
  • Code::blocks is a free, downloadable IDE that includes good OpenGL support. Use my "make.cbp" project file.
  • Visual Studio 2003 (full or academic), like at the Chapman Lab, has OpenGL support built in. Use my "make.vcproj" project file.
  • Visual Studio 2005 "Express" is the usual Visual Studio IDE, but can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. By default, Visual Studio express only comes with the standard C and C++ headers. To write windows or OpenGL code, you'll have to download the Microsoft Platform SDK and follow the directions on that page. If you don't care about windows and just want OpenGL, try my 20MB "OrionDev" package, and copy everything in OrionDev/include into "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\include" and everything in OrionDev/lib into "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\lib". Use my "make.vcproj" project file.
• For Mac OS X, any version of XCode (or Project Builder) has OpenGL support built in. If you use the command line, be sure to link with "-framework GLUT -framework OpenGL -lobjc".
• For Linux, gcc/g++ will work fine. Be sure to download and install the FreeGLUT source or developer packages for your linux installation. Also, see my Linux Driver Setup page to make it run fast.