APPLIED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Introduction to Computer Graphics

Jeton Lakna

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 COMPUTER GRAPHICS

• Nowadays computer graphics is all around us!

• No one wants a boring *text only* interface when interacting with a
computer, smart phone, smart home, ATM, or a car
• And even text is visualized via graphics based fonts

• Learning about graphics is highly useful for all computer scientists!

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 WHAT CAN I DO WITH GRAPHICS?

• You can develop graphics and layouts for product illustrations, company
logos, websites and improve your presentation/communication skills.

• Visualizations, 2D/3D animation, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality etc.

• Web design, Mobile app design, Infographics
• consider a smart phone and interactive media:
• (with its) user interface, camera, 2D image processing, etc

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 SMARTPHONES AND COMPUTERS

• Sales of smartphones outweigh sales of computer by a factor of 3

• 5+ billion mobile phones are in use worldwide
• World population is 7 billion

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 USER INTERFACES

Ivan Sutherland, Console

Apple iPad
Sketchpad, Light-pen, Controller
vector display
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2D IMAGE PROCESSING

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 DIGITAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES

• Digital photography
• Virtual Reality
• 3D Printer
• Inkjet and laser printers
• Digital video and HDTV
• Electronic books Sony Video Camera Touch, VR, 3D Print
• Graphics on the web:
• Photos (flickr)
• Videos (youtube)

Old Apple Laserwriter 7/26

 WHAT CAN I DO WITH GRAPHICS?

• Digital Media/Architects/Scientists/Engineers need graphics too

• Visualization of various phenomena, computer aided design (CAD),
product design(Invetor), virtual prototyping, simulation, etc.

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 SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION

The Virtual Human Brain R - Scientific

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COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN (CAD)

Revit Inventor

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 VISUAL SIMULATION AND TRAINING

• Apollo spacecraft
• Flight simulators
• Driving simulators
• Surgical simulation

Davinci surgical robot Police VR Training Driving simulator

Intuitive Surgical Toyota Higashifuji
Technical Center
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 WHAT CAN I DO WITH GRAPHICS?

Learn more about:

• Video games that lured many to computers and computer science in the
first place
• Virtual Reality
• Real Time TV production

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 VIDEO GAMES

GTA Counter Strike Warcraft

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 GRAPHICS HARDWARE

NVIDIA GeForce NVIDIA OptiX

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 VIRTUAL (MIX) REALITY

Ivan Sutherland: Head-

mounted displays, with HoloLens
mechanical tracker

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 WHAT CAN I DO WITH GRAPHICS?

• Of course, Hollywood Visual Effects!

• Often cannot film various real-world situations required in order to tell a story
• The situation may be too dangerous, impractical, expensive, or rare
• Or the situation doesn’t exist in reality, only in an alternative reality

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 VFX: LIQUIDS

Battleship

Terminator 2
The Day After Tomorrow 17/26
 VFX: GASES

Harry Potter and the Order of

the Phoenix Terminator 3

Star Wars Episode III 18/26

 VFX: SOLIDS

• Destruction: fracture, explosions, etc.

Super 8 2012

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 VFX: CG CREATURES

Sméagol/Gollum, The Lord of

the Rings
Yoda, Star Wars Episode II
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 VFX: DIGITAL DOUBLES

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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 MOTION CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY

Facial capture in Avatar

Motion capture of Olympic swimmer
Dana Vollmer by Manhattan Mocap
(technology transition)

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 WHAT CAN I DO WITH GRAPHICS?

• Animated Films!
• Instead of adding computer generated elements to real world film footage,
create a whole new digital world
• often with its own set of rules

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 ANIMATED FILMS

Toy Story 3 Hero 6

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Alone
 3D MAX / BLENDER

• We will use Blender and 3D Max in this course, so that you have a real-world working
graphics engine at your disposal
• Blender is open source so you can see all the code and how it works
• Blender uses a Scanline Rendering implemented via OpenGL for previz, which enables real time
scene design and manipulation
• Blender/3D max uses a Ray Tracer to render the final images, so they can be quite advanced/impressive
• 3D Max is free for students
• Make sure you have great grafik card and good ram memory.

• You can choose one of the softwares both of them are free just you need to register with your student ID.

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 REASONS TO TAKE THIS CLASS

• Creativity
• creative expression
• this class encourages/rewards creativity above all else; albeit, technical skills are taught/required
• by mixing visual artistry and computer science, one hopes to learn how to better use their creativity in
their everyday technical approaches

• Machine Learning
• CNNs are built off the human visual system and follow the nonlinear projection space used by one’s eyes
• Computer Vision is one of the main application areas for machine learning, and this class discusses
light, geometry, materials, cameras, etc. in a way that adds more insight to computer vision
• GANs and similar ideas were developed intuitively by thinking about human vision and
photographs (material covered in this class)
• Graphics is full of procedural methods for texture, geometry, etc. which are all good candidates for
machine learning (good research topics)

• Computer Graphics
• Introductory course for the sequence
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