Course Details

Introduction to computer image synthesis: modeling, animation, rendering, and geometric techniques. Topics include geometric transformations, modeling hierarchies, viewing and visibility, animation techniques, curve and surface design, lighting, shading, and ray tracing.

For Spring 2009: 
This course will survey state-of-the-art shape modeling research that aims at broadening our knowledge and understanding of shapes to create better digital modeling tools, and explores ways to communicate the human intentions of shape manipulation to the computer in a natural and effective manner. The course will begin by covering some introductory topics in geometric modeling, with an emphasis on discrete geometry processing: digital shape representations and related data structures, shape acquisition and reconstruction, smoothing and denoising, parameterization and remeshing. We will then concentrate on recent shape creation and manipulation research, touching on variational modeling techniques, space deformations, sketch-based modeling interfaces, shape interpolation and skeleton-skin animation of articulated bodies. The necessary mathematical tools will be presented along the way (these include topics in linear algebra, differential geometry and optimization).

An undergraduate course in computer graphics.