Instructor

Craig S. Kaplan (see also)
DC 2110
csk@uwaterloo.ca
Office hours: Mondays, 3:00–4:00 (or by appointment)

Teaching Assistants

Jumyung "JC" Chang
j48chang@uwaterloo.ca
Office hours: Mondays, 10:00–11:00 in DC 3594

Xiang Fang
x2fang@uwaterloo.ca
Office hours: Wednesdays, 2:00–3:00 in MC 3007

Boris Kravchenko
bkravche@uwaterloo.ca
Office hours: Fridays, 2:00–3:00 in MC 3007

Lectures

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:30–12:50, DWE 3518

Lab

MC 3007 (There are no scheduled lab times. The lab is available 24 hours a day for students enrolled in CS 488/688. The code to open the lab will be provided in class.)

Exams

Midterm: Thursday, October 27th, 11:30am-12:50pm in DWE 3518 (in class). The midterm covers everything up to the end of Hidden Surface Removal, and is worth 14% of your final grade.
Final: TBA

Course Outline

The course outline contains general information about the course, including the marking scheme, in a format mandated by the Registrar's Office.

Books

• CS 488/688 Lecture notes. Hardcopy available at Media.doc in MC 2018, or as a downloadable PDF.
• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (3rd Edition), by Hughes et al.
• Computer Graphics with Open GL (4th Edition), by Hearn, Baker and Carithers.
• OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3 (8th Edition), by Schreiner et al.

These books are recommended but not required. The Davis Centre library has these and other useful books for loan at the reserve desk.

Getting help

We're using Piazza for questions and discussions of class-related material. You should have been signed up at the start of the term, but you can sign up manually if necessary.

The readings in the official course notes are out of date, as we change textbooks and new editions come out. Here is a selection of readings for this term's offering. "CGPP" and "CGOGL" refer to the textbooks Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice and Computer Graphics with OpenGL, respectively.

• Module 2: Introduction
  • CGPP: Chapter 1, Section 3.1, Section 15.1, Section 15.2, Section 16.3
• Module 5: Geometries
  Module 6: Affine Geometry and Transformations
  Module 7: Windows, Viewports, NDC
  • CGPP: Sections 7.1–7.7, Chapter 10, Chapter 11
• Module 9: Projections and Projective Transformations
  • CGPP: Sections 10.13, Chapter 13, Section 36.5
• Module 11: Polygons
  • CGPP: Sections 7.10
• Module 12: Hidden Surface Removal
  • CGPP: Chapter 36
• Module 13: Hierarchical Models and Transformations
  • CGPP: Section 6.6
  • My slides
• Module 15: Colour and the Human Visual System
  • CGPP: Chapter 28
  • My slides
• Module 16: Reflection and Light Source Models
  • CGPP: Sections 6.2.2, 6.2.3, 6.5, Chapter 27 (advanced)
  • My slides
• Module 18: Ray tracing
  • Andrew Glassner, Introduction to Ray Tracing (full book available at DC library reserve desk)
  • Peter Shirley et al., Foundations of Computer Graphics, Chapter 10 (Ray Tracing)
  • David Kirk and James Arvo, "The Ray Tracing Kernel"
  • My slides
  • My slides about global illumination
• Animation
  • My slides

Start by visiting the old home page for the course, where you'll find lots of other useful information and links.

• The website open.gl is a great starting point for programming in modern OpenGL, featuring a sequence of well written tutorials.
• See also the longer sequence of tutorials at learnopengl.com, which go into more detail about specific topics.
• Song Ho Ahn also has a number of useful tutorials that explain concepts in 3D computer graphics, especially as related to the OpenGL graphics pipeline.
• Visit docs.gl for the best OpenGL API reference.
• You might also want to look at Terence's OpenGL tutorial slides.
• The Graphics Codex is a highly detailed overview of core topics in computer graphics, with lots of sample code and well documented equations. It's available online and as an app for iOS. The website includes very detailed programming projects. You might also want to look at the syllabus for Morgan McGuire's graphics course at Williams College, which covers lots of great topics and techniques related to procedural generation.
• Peter Shirley has written some fun, short, tutorial-style e-books to help you build ray tracers. The approach they use doesn't map perfectly onto our Assignment 4, but might neverthess provide some useful ideas, and inspiration for the final project. Separately, he has made the tray tracing chapter from his main textbook available for free online. It provides lots of useful formulas.

If you are familiar with other resources or websites that would be of general use to students in this course, please send them to us and we might add them here.