CSCI 371
Computational Graphics Fall 2016
Division III Quantitative/Formal Reasoning
This is not the current course catalog

PhotoShop, medical MRIs, video games, and movie special effects all programmatically create and manipulate digital images. This course teaches the fundamental techniques behind these applications. We begin by building a mathematical model of the interaction of light with surfaces, lenses, and an imager. We then study the data structures and processor architectures that allow us to efficiently evaluate that physical model.
Students will complete a series of programming assignments for both photorealistic image creation and real-time 3D rendering using C++, OpenGL, and GLSL. These assignments cumulate in a multi-week final project. Topics covered in the course include: projective geometry, ray tracing, bidirectional surface scattering functions, binary space partition trees, matting and compositing, shadow maps, cache management, and parallel processing on GPUs.