title: Special Topics in Computer Graphics: Global Illumination
professor: Paul Heckbert
format: two 1.5 hour meetings per week

course number: 15-860(A)
time and place: MW 10:30-11:50 Wean 3412
NOTE: first class meets Sept. 16 (not Aug. 26)

CS graduate core units: 1
University units: 12

This course will explore topics in computer graphics image synthesis in
considerable depth.  Unlike a traditional lecture course, students will
work together and with the professor, doing research and software
development as a group.  The focus of the course will be on global
illumination, the simulation of indirect illumination in 3-dimensional
scenes consisting of dull (diffuse) surfaces, and shiny (specular)
surfaces, and foggy transparent volumes.

The professor will steer the topic of the course, recommend most of the
reading, give lectures on background material, and lead the critiques.
Students will be active participants in course, doing much of the
presentation of research papers, collectively determining the specifics
of the group software project, selecting algorithms to be implemented,
and determining the software module design.  At the end of the course,
students will write up their results.

By the end of the course, students should be current in the state of
the art in global illumination to the extent that they could write
research papers in the area.  With computer graphics as the vehicle,
the course is more generally intended to teach literature search using
libraries and the World Wide Web, critical reading of research papers,
theoretical and empirical evaluation of algorithms, software design for
large projects, practical programming, collaborative research,
and good presentation skills.

Prerequisites: undergraduate computer graphics (e.g. 15-462, 463),
calculus. Note: motivated undergrads may take this course.

Evaluation: proposals, intermediate reports, and oral presentations
will be graded in the middle of the semester, and the final report will
be graded at the end of the semester.

Syllabus:
    review of surface modeling
    optics
	light
	reflection, transmission, and scattering
    ray tracing algorithms
	spatial data structures
	monte carlo sampling
    radiosity algorithms
	matrix radiosity
	progressive radiosity
	intro. to finite element methods
	mesh generation for radiosity
	intro. to wavelets
	wavelet radiosity
    hybrid methods
	distribution ray tracing
	intro. to spherical harmonics
	specular radiosity
	participating media
    complex scenes
	clustering
	surface simplification

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This course is different from 15-862, Rendering, as I taught it a year ago.
If you took that course, you still might be interested in this, since
it covers a narrower range of topics in much greater depth.

Please email me if you're interested in the course,
or check http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph the week before Sept. 16.

-Paul
ph@cs.cmu.edu