| Time: | Wed 3 PM, Fri 12:30 PM | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Place: | TBD | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Instructor: | David Luebke (Olsson #219), luebke@cs.virginia.edu
Office hours: by appointment |
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| Assignments: | One end-of-semester course project, details to follow | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Format: | Paper-reading seminar; students and instructor take turns presenting papers. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Description: | Ray tracing has long been known as an elegant and powerful, but very slow,
technique for producing realistic imagery. Over time, however, the concept of
ray tracing at interactive rates has gone from an oxymoron at best, or a bad
joke at worst, to an accepted reality. Today one can ray trace complex scenes at
near-real time rates on a desktop PC or even a commodity video card. In this
seminar we will explore the literature of this very young branch of computer
graphics. We will discuss the "how" of interactive ray tracing: the developments
in hardware and algorithms that have made this possible. We will also address
the more important question of "why": what, if anything, does interactive ray
tracing offer over the extremely sophisticated and powerful polygonal rendering
hardware that has been developed over the past twenty years? What novel
rendering strategies does real-time ray tracing enable over what was previously
possible? Can ray tracing usefully augment production real-time rendering
systems such as games? The seminar will emphasize the systems issues of making ray tracing fast and the rendering/perceptual issues of how to use ray tracing in novel ways, rather than the underlying mathematics of generating realistic images. Students should have experience with computer graphics and systems programming. The seminar workload will be fairly light (there are not THAT many papers to study yet), but students will be expected to do a programming project. As the field is so young, a good class project could well lead to a publishable result. |
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| Lectures: | A tentative schedule of follows. I will
also try to post any electronic notes or presentation source.
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| Grading: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Honor Code: | The honor code applies to all work turned in for this course. Specific guidelines will be given. Ask if you have questions. |