CS 248 rendering competition

CS 248 Rendering Competition

Course Description

CS 248 is an introductory course in computer graphics, covering a variety of topics: fundamentals of input, display, and hardcopy devices, scan conversion of geometric primitives, 2D and 3D geometric transformations, clipping and windowing, scene modeling and animation, algorithms for visible surface determination, introduction to local and global shading models, color, and photorealistic image synthesis.

Project and Competition

For the last two years, the central project of the course has consisted of writing a triangle renderer (scan-converter) which encompasses sampling techniques, texture-mapping, and, optionally, special effects such as depth-of-field and motion blur. In addition, the students participate in a "render-off" competition to generate the best image or set of images (including animations). The winner is selected by a panel of computer graphics experts drawn from industry and academia, and receives an all-expenses-paid trip to SIGGRAPH the following summer.

Images from Past Competitions:

Resources

The principal computer resource used in the competition (and throughout the course) is the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory at Sweet Hall 026. The lab contains 14 Silicon Graphics Indigo R4000-based graphics workstations with 24-bit frame buffers, and an optical scanner for digitizing images and textures.

The software available for the course comprised the following packages:

A simplified platform-independent GUI development environment written by Apostolos Lerios. This package relieved the students from the burden of learning Motif to build their projects' user interface. Also the package allowed code development on any platform for the benefit of SITN students and students with special needs.
In the spring of 1994, we used EZmodeler, written by Alain Dumesny, which is a simple interactive modeler for a small class of 3D objects. In the spring of 1995, we migrated to i3dm, a more advanced modeler based on Open Inventor.
A 3D box and triangle mesh scene assembly program called Composer. Composer also handles simple transformations of primitive objects' geometry, but it is not meant to be a modeler. It was originally written by Brian Curless using Inventor, SGI's 3D toolkit. At a later time, Apostolos Lerios tailored it for CS 248 by modifying the file interface and rebuilding the underlying Inventor interface to communicate with Open Inventor.

Last update: 14 June 1995 by Apostolos "Toli" Lerios

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