Lectures for CMSC 740: Graduate Computer Graphics

This page has pointers to the material covered in each lecture and will be updated throughout the semester. The lecture notes appearing on this page are copyrighted by Amitabh Varshney, except for images that appear with appropriate credits. Use of these lecture notes by students of the class CMSC 740 at the University of Maryland is permitted for their educational purposes. Any other use requires permission of the author.

These course notes are visible only from umd.edu domains.

The following reading suggestions are for the case when you do not fully understand what was discussed in the lectures. Unfortunately, the following list does not cover everything discussed in the class (there is no perfect textbook yet).


January 26

Discussion of course policies and course plan
Motivation, Overview, Pixel Operations, and Line Scan Conversion
applications, pipeline, bitmaps, pixmaps, raster/vector graphics, line scan-conversion
PDF(2), PDF(6)

January 31

Graphics Architectures and APIs
Evolution of graphics architectures, GPUs, OpenGL, GLUT
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 2

2D and 3D Transformations
translate, scale, rotate, shear, homogenous coordinates, composition, local and global coordinates, 3D rotations, quaternions
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 7 and 9

3D Viewing
Parallel and perspective projections, backface and view-frustum culling
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 14

Illumination and Shading
local illumination and interpolative shading
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 16

Texturing
uses, types, mapping
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 21

Scan-conversion of Lines and Polygons
overview of various algorithms
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 23

Visibility Culling and Visibility Determination
Depth Cues, Z-buffer, BSP trees
PDF(2), PDF(6)

February 28

Ray Tracing
algorithms and acceleration
PDF(2), PDF(6)

March 2

Volume Graphics
overview, rendering algorithms
PDF(2), PDF(6)

March 7 and 9

Programmable Shading and GPU Programming
evolution of programmable shading, vertex/fragment shaders, Cg
PDF(2), PDF(6)

March 14

Midterm

March 16

Aliasing and Filtering
sampling, reconstruction, filtering
PDF(2), PDF(6)

Class Projects

March 28 and 30

Rendering Equation and Basis Functions
global illumination and Spherical Harmonic Lighting
PDF(2), PDF(6)

Overview of Cluster Access/Programming
Overview of Visualization Cluster

April 4

Radiosity
motivation and basic algorithm
PDF(2), PDF(6)

April 6 and 11

Multiresolution Meshes
motivation, methods, static/dynamic, errors, view-dependence
PDF(2), PDF(6)

April 13

Implicit Surfaces
motivation, methods, blobs, metaballs, soft objects, rendering, reconstruction, CSG modeling, collisions, deformations
PDF(2), PDF(6)

April 18

Implicit, Procedural, and Parametric Modeling Methods
overview of various modeling techniques
PDF(2), PDF(6)

April 20

Point-based Graphics
modeling and rendering with points
PDF(2), PDF(6)

April 25

Image-based Graphics
image-based rendering, 3D image warping, multiple viewpoint image blending, lightfields/lumigraphs
PDF(2), PDF(6)

April 27

Computer Animation
key-frames, procedural, motion capture, stylization
PDF(2), PDF(6)

May 2

Human Visual system and displays
various display technologies
PDF(2), PDF(6)

May 4

Multi-pass Rendering and Course Wrap up
shadows, light maps, course recap
PDF(2), PDF(6)