Due: Monday, November 9th
Evaluation: There will be no quiz this week. We’ll have a quiz on this material after we’ve discussed it in lecture. This can be tricky stuff, and will appear a lot in upcoming programming assignments, homework assignments, and exam questions.
Required Reading
Chapter 15 of Foundations of Computer Graphics: is a thorough introduction to curves. It’s a little too focused on the derivations (which is the way that I used to teach it), but makes clear things like continuity conditions and piecewise representations. So read 15, 15.1 and 15.2. Look through 15.3 and 15.4 (since it will help you understand later stuff), and 15.5 (Cardinal cubics are really important – and will be the basis of an upcoming assignment). And 15.6.1 on Beziers is important. Don’t worry about B-Splines (15.6.2) – they are really important, but we won’t have time to cover them now.
Supplemental Readings:
The following two resources provide different views of the same material, and might be helpful in understanding it.
Chapter 13 of Real Time Rendering: Section 13.1 contains a good introduction to parametric curves, especially Beziers. Don’t worry about Rational Beziers, drawing filled regions (13.1.1). 13.1.5 is something we won’t really cover in class, but is really useful in practice.
Chapter 20 of Hart’s Big Fun Graphics Book: is a nice treatment of the same topics. Again, stop when you get to B-Splines.
