Photorealistic graphics (NPGR004)

Code/hours: NPGR004, 2/2 Z + Zk (summer)
Schedule: no English lecture is scheduled, contact Tomas Iser if you are interested in taking a course in English (---)
Lecturer: please contact Tomas Iser if you are interested!
Prerequisites: basic programming course (C#), basic calculus and linear algebra, Introduction to Computer graphics (NPGR003)

The lecture builds upon Introduction to Computer graphics and is intended for serious enthusiasts in this field. It covers modern areas of 3D graphics (basic image synthesis): lighting models and shading, recursive ray tracing including enhanced and accelerated variants, textures, anti-aliasing, and sampling, the use of stochastic approaches in realistic rendering, basics of radiosity method, and modern Monte Carlo methods for lighting computation.

The lecture is supplemented with exercises in the computer laboratory. Exercises focus on practical aspects of the subject, and to obtain credit, it is necessary to work on a semester project. Basic knowledge of .NET programming and the C# language is sufficient.

Syllabus

shading and shadows - basic and physically plausible shading models, smooth shading, shadow casting
ray-tracing - principles of ray casting, recursive ray tracing, ray vs. object intersections, CSG scene representation
anti-aliasing and sampling - principles of anti-aliasing, various sampling methods, adaptive sampling
textures - 2D and 3D textures, procedural textures, noise functions
distributed ray-tracing (Monte-Carlo) - principle, applications in soft shadows, glossy reflections, motion blur, etc.
ray-tracing speedup - bounding volumes, bounding hierarchies, spatial directories, tree-based speedup techniques
radiosity - introduction to radiometry, basic principles of radiosity methods
Monte-Carlo rendering - unbiased estimators (Monte-Carlo quadrature), usage in physically sound solutions of the global illumination problem, examples of practical algorithms using the Monte-Carlo principle

Literature

[PBRT2010] Pharr M., Humphreys G.: Physically Based Rendering: From Theory To Implementation. Morgan Kaufmann; 2nd edition, 2010
[Veach1997] Veach E.: Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1997.
[Glassner1989] A. Glassner: An Introduction to Ray Tracing, Academic Press, 1989
[Shirley2009] P. Shirley, M. Ashikhmin, S. Marschner: Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, 3rd edition, A K Peters, 2009
[Glassner1995] A. Glassner: Principles of Digital Image Synthesis, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1995
[Foley1995] J. Foley, A. van Dam, S. Feiner, J. Hughes: Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice, 2nd edition in C, Addison-Wesley, 1995