Class

Class will be held from 2:00 to 3:20 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the Mark Taper Hall or Humanities (THH), in room 212. The instructor is Erin Shaw.

Class newsgroup

The discussion group for the class is at news:usc.class.csci480.

Course description

This course will focus on the fundamental concepts of computer graphics. This is primarily a programming course; algorithms, data structures, and the mathematics of the field will be emphasized. Topics will include two dimensional graphics, raster methods, and antialiasing; color and human vision; applied geometry and modeling; the graphics rendering pipeline: transformations, clipping and viewing;. This course does not cover the use of graphics design applications such as Photoshop and AutoCAD. Nor, does it focus on the various graphics programming interfaces or graphics languages such as OpenGL or Renderman. This course is modeled after a computer graphics course that is taught at MIT. Of all the courses I looked at, I felt most comfortable with this one w.r.t to the content and projects. I think the amount of content is a little agressive, but if the students there can handle it, I'm sure the students here can, too.

Prerequisites

Students should have taken a course in data structures, acquired an in-depth knowledge of at least one programming language, preferably C, C++, or Java, and have some familiarity with calculus and linear algebra. The appendix of the Hearn & Baker text is an excellent reference for mathematics for computer graphics. If you do not think you can learn the mathematics in Appendices A1-A9 (it will be taught in class) it is recommended that you not take the class.

Textbook

Hearn, Donald and M. Pauline Baker, Computer Graphics, C version, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1997, 652 pages, ISBN 0-13-530924-7. This book is clearly written and provides a good introduction to most of the topics that we will cover this semester. The illustrations and code fragments are a good supplement to the materials covered in the lectures. The C code in the book should be understandable to everyone whether or not you choose to write in C. All reading assignments will be considered fair game for inclusion on the mid-term and final exams, whether or not the material was covered in class.

Optional References Flanagan, David, Java in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition, O'Reilly and Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, California, 1997, 628 pages, ISBN 1-56592-262-X. This book is optional. Most of our classroom examples will be in Java, and you may wish to do all of your programming in it. Java in a Nutshell, and its tutorial companion, Java Examples in a Nutshell, are good programming reference books, though they lack some of the pedagogical detail that a newcomer to Java might prefer.

Last modified on March 5, 1999 by shaw@isi.edu