Assignments (list page)

Portfolio 2 will be a chance for you to do things you’ve already done, but better. In workbooks 6-9, you had to make various objects to try out concepts. In this portfolio, you need to make those same objects - it’s just a chance to make nicer versions of them.

The real learning goal of this topic is to understand how the graphics hardware works, and how we can program it.

We need to know how the hardware works so that we can use it effectively (it will explain why some things seem weird). We also need to understand the graphics hardware so we can program it (write Shaders). Let me stress: shader programming won’t make sense unless you understand the graphics hardware.

In practice, this is becoming less important: the high level APIs (such as THREE) have written really good, flexible shaders - so the reasons to write your own are less common (the big ones are procedural textures and special effects).

The fifth topic is about appearance in 3D, but it is mainly about texture - how we add more visual interest to our objects by changing how we “color” our objects (not by making the objects themselves more complex).

Here again, there is all the interesting stuff that makes it work, and then there’s the practical aspects of using a high-level API and graphics hardware (that takes care of the details for us). The focus in the workbooks is on using the ideas. We’ll dig deeper into how things work as well.

This fourth topic week gets us to 3D! The workbooks focus on 3D programming - using the basic mechanisms to make stuff. The readings talk about what is going on “underneath the hood”. It is hard to make the connections: the high-level APIs we use hide the details. However, it is worth it to spend the effort to learn the underlying math.

For our first “portfolio” assignment, you will assemble a “web” that shows off programs that demonstrate that you can apply the ideas we learned about in class to create actual graphics programs.

The third week of assignments focus on Curves - a tricky topic that I find fascinating. In the regular class, we divide it between a (rather long) workbook, and a programming assignment (the train). For this class, we’ll move the train to the portfolio (next week), so you can take more time to dig into curves (and get a head start on the portfolio).

The second week of assignments focus on one of the most important ideas in computer graphics: transformations. The idea is that geometry is much easier to think about/work with if we do it in a convenient coordinate system - so we make sure to describe things in convenient coorinate systems, and use transformations to move between those coordinate systems. We’ll explore the use of transformations in 2D (trust me, it is better to understand it in 2D and then we’ll see that things work in 3D).

This is our first week of assignments (for the second week of class). It will be a “normal” content week - but since it is the first week we’ll need to work the bugs out of the mechanisms, and you’ll need to do some extra “getting started work”. The real work of the week are Workbooks 1 and 2, but as you do them, you need to be thinking ahead to Portfolio 1, and also looking at some supplemental resources.