Undergraduate Computer Graphics

ECS 175
Computer Graphics

CRN #93803

Inside a virtual spaceship, by student Matt Hibbs.

Professor: Nina Amenta
Lecture: MWF 10:00-10:50, 166 Chemistry
Lab Hours: Wds 2-4, in 71 Kemper

Teaching Assistant: Zehra Shah, zshah "at" ucdavis.edu
Discussion Section: Fri 3:10-4:00 166 Chemistry
Lab Hours: Thurs 1-3, 71 Kemper

Writing computer graphics code was pretty easy for a while, but in recent years the hardware has gotten so complicated that writing the software has gotten quite difficult again. On the bright side, it means that in this course you will get a real systems-level understanding of interactive computer graphics (how video games work), from hardware through graphic design. We'll use a version of the "Modern OpenGL" API, roughly the part of OpenGL 2 which is shared with OpenGL 3.

Syllabus

Course Description

Lectures and reading

Tests

Projects

Example OpenGL programs to test your OpenGL setup on your machine.
Project 1 - Big Pixels, Due 10pm Mon Apr 16
Project 2 - Fractal Plant, Due 10pm Mon Apr 30
Project 3 - Glass Ball 3D Interface, Due 10pm Mon May 21
Project 4 - Virtual World, Due 10pm Mon June 4

Texts

The textbook is:

Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, 3rd Edition (2nd Edition would be fine too)
Peter Shirley, et. al.
A K Peters, Ltd., 2005

You may also want to buy:

OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide
Aaftab Munshi, Dan Ginsburg, Dave Shreiner
Addison-Wesley Professional

This is the book for the embedded systems OpenGL (eg. on phones), and although we are not using OpenGL ES it is essentially the same as the subset of OpenGL that we are using, without any extraneous stuff. WebGL (for applications embedded in a browser) is also very similar. Basically we will use the commands described in BOTH the OpenGL 2.1 reference page AND the OpenGL 3.3 reference page.

Handouts

Online Resources

There are many Web pages about OpenGL, but it is hard to know which to use since different versions of OpenGL are very different from each other - OpenGL 4 has little in common with OpenGL 1.

The OpenGL Wikibook is a great source of examples for the "modern" sort of OpenGL 2 we'll be using. Here tutorial number 6, with libraries and Makefiles, which run in the labs in Kemper. Here is a Mac version, and here is a Windows version. Get this running on your machine and you should be good to go.
A good online source for learning about graphics is David Mount's lecture notes from the University of Maryland (although using OpenGL 1; once again, ignore the code fragments).
The GLUT library connects OpenGL to your operating system's windows, in a fairly portable way. So, you can develop on your machine at home and get the same program to run on the machines in the lab.
The OpenGL math library, glm, helps with a lot of the basic computations.

ECS 175 Computer Graphics