1. Fall 2010 CSC 4820/6820 Computer Graphics Algorithms Lecture 1 Instructor: Dr. Ying Zhu

2. Overview Course Overview Course Webpage Administrative issues
What is computer graphics?
Course Webpage
6820/home.htm

3. Office Hours & Contact Information
Office Hours
Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Or by appointment
Office: 34 Peachtree Street (One Park Tower building) room1441
Phone: (404)

4. Email Correspondence I have created a Google group for the class
I will send class related announcements to this group.
By default, I will add your GSU account to the group.
If you prefer a different account, please subscribe with that account.

5. Correspondence
When sending me , please make sure to include “CSc4820” or “CSc6820” in the subject line.

6. Prerequisites CSc 2311 (Principles of Computer Programming II), or
CSc 3320 (System-Level Programming),
Math 3030
Basic programming skills in C or C++

7. Textbook
OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 3.0 and 3.1, 7th Edition, by Dave Shreiner, et al. Addison-Wesley, 2009
The most comprehensive OpenGL programming book
Also known as the “red book”

8. Unity3D Unity3D: http://unity3d.com/
Unity3D Manual: nual/index.html
You need to know a little JavaScript to write Unity3D scripts

9. Additional References
OpenGL Super Bible, Richard Wright, Benjamin Lipchak, and Nicholas Haemel, 5th edition, Addison-Wesley, 2010

10. Grading For CSc 4820 students: For CSc 6820 students:
Homework assignments: 30%
Projects: 50%
Final exam: 20%  
For CSc 6820 students:
Graduate student project 20%

11. Grading The grading scale is as follows: A: 90+ B: 80 - 89 C: 70 - 79

12. Grading
All grades will be posted on uLearn.

13. Tentative Schedule
Tentative course schedule is available online at /home.htm

14. Projects & Assignments
About 5 projects and 5 homework assignments
All projects and homework assignments are individual work
Graduate students needs to complete an additional project
This can be individual or group project

15. Projects Overview Project 1: basic OpenGL and GLUT programming
Project 2: transformation, viewing, projection, and basic interaction
Project 3: lighting, surface materials, and animation
Project 4: texture mapping, fog, transparency, animation
Project5: Unity3D project, possibly a iPhone or iPad App.

16. Homework Overview
Homework 0: set up your OpenGL programming environment, get to know your graphics card
Not graded
In each homework assignment, you will create a short tutorial to explain a certain technique of OpenGL or Unity3D programming using a sample program.

17. Lecture Notes
Lecture notes will be posted on course web page at /home.htm

18. Teaching Assistant
To be announced

19. Classroom Etiquette
Please do not talk to each other during the lecture
But do ask me questions
Please silence your cell phone while in class
Please do not take or make phone calls in class

20. Other Administrative Issues
Please read the syllabus at /csc _syllabus.htm

21. Any questions?

22. What is Computer Graphics?
The word “Computer Graphics” means different things to different people.
We will focus on 3D interactive computer graphics:
How to create and store geometry objects (Modeling)
How to manipulate geometry objects (Animation)
How to generate and display images of geometry objects (Rendering)
User interaction
Images courtesy Discreet
Lord of the Rings

23. Major Fields in Computer Graphics
Modeling
How to create and store geometry objects
Animation
How to manipulate geometry objects
Rendering
How to generate and display images of geometry objects

24. General Goals of CG
Modeling & rendering: create photo-realistic images
Is it real or is it CG?
Animation: create visually realistic simulation
Towards true real-time performance
60 frames per second
Flexible user interaction
Use CG techniques to advance other fields

25. Major Applications Entertainment Training and education
3D games
Films
Training and education
E.g. flight simulator, military training, firefighter training
Medical visualization
Scientific visualization
E.g. bioinformatic visualization, data visualization

26. About this course Focus on graphics programming Main topis:
The fundamentals of 3D graphics pipeline
3D transformation, camera manipulation, lighting, texture mapping, frame buffer operations, etc.
Graphics Processing Unit and shader programming

27. About this course Main topics:
The current state of the art in computer graphics and expected near term advances.

28. About this course
We will cover both the low level (OpenGL) and high level (Unity3D) graphics programming, with more emphasis on OpenGL programming

29. Graphics programming tools
Visual Studio
AMD’s RenderMoney ( y/Pages/default.aspx) or nVidia’s FX Composer ( ser_home.html)
gDebugger (

30. OpenGL OpenGL is an API for computer graphics programming
Based on C, not a separate language
Over 250 function calls
OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL): a C-like language for writing shaders – small programs that run on the Graphics Processing Units
Since 2009, GLSL is fully integrated with OpenGL.

31. Unity3D An award winning game engine
Can be used to develop 3D games for PCs, Macs, consoles, iPhone, iPad, or Android
There is a free version
Web deployment
Use JavaScript for scripting
Support Cg shaders

32. Why study computer graphics
3D graphics is everywhere. The graphics related industry is growing very fast.
Sales of video-game software in the United States: $9.9 billion in 2005 (compared with the $11.4 billion sale by music industry in 2004).
By 2010, U.S. sales of video games are expected to grow to $15 billion.
Video gaming is expected to generate more than 250,000 jobs by 2009
The average age of gamers was 33 years, and 25% of players were older than 50.

33. Why study computer graphics
Non-graphics related fields are using graphics hardware to speed up their applications
Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)
Open Computing Language (OpenCL)
Advanced visual interface will be crucial for future digital products

34. Why study computer graphics
Tools for creating 3D graphics contents have become very powerful and very cheap
Computer graphics is a relatively rare skill

35. Next Lecture
An Overview of 3D Computer Graphics