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CS838 Topics in Computing : Advanced Computer Graphics

Fall Semester 2014

Course outline

This course is intended to expand the scope of exposure of graduate students and advanced undergraduates to modern computer graphics principles. The class will examine both fundamental graphics topics, but at a depth that is more appropriate for students with prior experience in the area of computing, and also sample current topics representative of vibrant trends in academic and industry practice. The course should be accessible to advanced students in all areas, given a certain prior experience in visual computing, a level of comfort with programming, and a health dose of enthusiasm!

Some of the topics to be covered are listed below. Note that this list will likely be adapted to the dynamic and composition of the audience.

Modeling and geometry: Point-based models, implicit surfaces, mesh generation and processing and optimization, principles of differential geometry.
Rendering: Introduction to Global Illumination, the rendering equation, radiosity, photon mapping. Image-based rendering.
Shape manipulation: Laplacian mesh processing, shape morphing, non-rigid registration, parameterization.
Animation: Skinning techniques, facial animation, motion editing and control, performance-driven animation.
Dynamics: Cloth modeling and animation, collisions and interactions, rigid body simulation, introduction to computational modeling of fluids.
Various topics: Sound modeling, interactive rendering, shape synthesis, general-purpose GPU computing.

General information

Lecture meeting time : Mondays & Wednesdays Tue/Thu 2:30pm - 3:45pm
Lecture location : Psychology 121

Instructor : Eftychios Sifakis
Office : Computer Sciences building, Room 6355
Email : sifakis <at> cs <dot> wisc <dot> edu
Office hours : Monday & Wednesday 11:00am - 12:00pm or by appointment

Prerequisites : CS559 Computer Graphics, which can be waived by instructor consent (such a waiver can summarily be granted if a similar course has been completed at a different institution).

Piazza Discussion Forum : [URL]

Schedule of lectures

DATE	Lecture Information	Assignments & Reading Materials
Wednesday, September 3rd	Introduction, course scope and logistics [Lecture Notes - PDF]
Monday, September 8th	Point-based modeling	Hoppe et al, "Surface reconstruction from unorganized points", SIGGRAPH 1992 [Link] Alexa et al, "Computing and rendering point set surfaces", IEEE TVCG 2003 [Link]
Wednesday, September 10th	Introduction to implicit surface models. Contouring methods.	Kazhdan et al, "Poisson surface reconstruction", Symp. Geometry Processing 2006 [Link]
Monday, September 15th	Surface reconstruction. Radial Basis Function representations.	Carr et al, "Reconstruction and Representation of 3D Objects with Radial Basis Functions", SIGGRAPH 2001 [Link] Breen et al "Level set and PDE methods for computer graphics", SIGGRAPH 2004 Courses [Link]
Wednesday, September 17th		Turk and O'Brien "Shape transformation using variational implicit functions", SIGGRAPH 1999 (Also in SIGGRAPH 2005 Courses) [Link] (**) Cohen-Steiner et al "Variational shape approximation", SIGGRAPH 2004 [Link]
Monday, September 22nd		(**) H. Hoppe "Progressive Meshes", SIGGRAPH 1996 [Link] Hoppe et al, "Mesh optimization", SIGGRAPH 1993 [Link]
Wednesday, September 24th		(**) Sorkine et al "Laplacian surface editing", SGP 2004 [Link]
Monday, September 29th		(**) Lewis et al, "Pose space deformation: a unified approach to shape interpolation and skeleton-driven deformation", SIGGRAPH 2000 [Link]
Wednesday, October 1st		(**) Sumner and Popovic, "Deformation transfer for triangle meshes", SIGGRAPH 2004 [Link]
Monday, October 6th
Wednesday, October 8th
Monday, October 13rd
Wednesday, October 15th
Monday, October 20th
Wednesday, October 22nd
Monday, October 27th
Wednesday, October 29th
Monday, November 3rd		(**) I. Wald, T. Kollig, C. Benthin, A. Keller and P. Slusallek, Interactive global illumination using Fast Ray Tracing, Proceedings of the EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Rendering 2002. [Link]
Wednesday, November 5th		(**) J. Kajiya and T. Kay, Rendering fur with three dimensional textures, Computer Graphics, 23(3) pp. 271-280, 1989 [Link]
Monday, November 10th		(**) Stephen H. Westin, James R. Arvo, and Kenneth E. Torrance. Predicting reflectance functions from complex surfaces. Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '92 Proceedings), 26:255--264, July 1992 [Link]
Wednesday, November 12th		(**) A. Keller, Instant radiosity, pp. 49-56, SIGGRAPH 97. [Link]
Monday, November 17th
Wednesday, November 19th
Monday, November 24th
Wednesday, November 26th
Monday, December 1st
Wednesday, December 3rd
Monday, December 8th
Wednesday, December 10th

Project assingments

TBD

Presentation assingments

TBD

Grading policy

The final grade will be computed based on the following:

40% Attendance, presentation & reading assignments : Students will be asked to turn in brief write-ups on assigned reading, and prepare short in-class presentations on assigned papers/topics, leading to a follow-up discussion.
60% Project assignments : Projects will be assigned to groups of 2 students, with two separate deliverables (mid-semester, end-of-semester) during the course of the class.