Introduction

Introduction to Computer Graphics

Dr. Umair Ali Khan
What is Computer Graphics?
 Includes everything on computers that is not text or sound
 Refers to any computer device or program that makes a computer
capable of displaying and manipulating pictures
 Creation, storage and manipulation of models and images
 Such models come from diverse and expanding set of fields including
physical, mathematical, artistic, biological, etc

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What is Interactive Computer Graphics?
 User controls content, structure, and appearance of objects and their displayed images
via rapid visual feedback
 Basic components of an interactive graphics system
 input (e.g., mouse, tablet and stylus, multi-touch…)
 processing (and storage)
 display/output (e.g., screen, paper-based printer,
video recorder…)
 First truly interactive graphics system,
Sketchpad, pioneered at MIT by Ivan
Sutherland for his 1963 Ph.D. thesis
 Used TX-2 transistorized “mainframe” at Note CRT monitor, light pen and
Lincoln Lab function-key panel

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Enabling Modern Computer Graphics (1/5)
 Hardware revolution
 Moore’s Law: every 12-18 months, computer power improves
by factor of 2 in price / performance as feature size shrinks
 Significant advances in commodity graphics chips every 6
months vs. several years for general purpose CPUs
 NVIDIA GTX 680… 3090.4 gigaflops nVidia GeForceTM chip

 Newest processors are 64-bit, 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 core

 Intel Core i7 – consumer, up to 6 cores hyperthreaded to provide
12 threads
 Intel Sandy Bridge EP– industrial, 8 cores HT, 16 threads

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Enabling Modern Computer Graphics (2/5)
 Graphic subsystems
 Offloads graphics processing from CPU to chip designed for doing graphics operations
quickly
 nVidia GeForce™, ATI Radeon™
 GPUs used for special purpose computation, also bunched together to make supercomputers
 GPU has led to development of other dedicated subsystems
 Physics: nVidia PhysX PPU (Physics Processing Unit), standard on many NVIDIA GPUs
 Hardware show and tell: Dept’s new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460s
 1.35 GHz clock, 1GB memory, 37.8 billion pixels/second fill rate
 Old cards: GeForce 7300 GT: 350 MHz clock, 256 MB memory, 2.8 billion
fill rate

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Enabling Modern Computer Graphics (3/5)
 Input Devices
 Mouse, tablet & stylus, multi-touch, force feedback, and other game controllers (e.g., Wii),
scanner, digital camera (images, computer vision), etc.
 Whole body as interaction device:
 http://www.xbox.com/kinect

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Enabling Modern Computer Graphics (4/5)
 Many form factors
 Cell Phones/PDAs (smartphones), Apple iPhone™ Samsung Galaxy
laptop/desktops/tablets, SIII (Android)

Microsoft
 Microsoft PPI display Surface

 Google glass, Samsung gear

Microsoft PPI
display

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Enabling Modern Computer Graphics (5/5)
 Software Improvements
 Algorithms and data structures
 Modeling of materials
 Rendering of natural phenomena
 “Acceleration data structures” for ray tracing
 Parallelization
 Most operations are embarrassingly parallel: changing value of one pixel is
often independent of other pixels
 Distributed and Cloud computing
 Send operations into ‘cloud’, get back results, don’t care how
 Rendering even available as internet service!

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Environmental Evolution (1/5)
 Character Displays (1960s – now)
 Display: text plus pseudo-graphics (ASCII art)
 Object and command specification: command-line typing
 Control over appearance: coding for text formatting
(.p = paragraph, .i 5 = indent 5)
 Application control: single task

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 Environmental Evolution (2/5)
 Vector (Calligraphic, Line Drawing)
 Displays (1963 – 1980s)
 Display: line drawings and stroke text; 2D and 3D transformation hardware
 Object and command specification: command-line typing, function keys, menus
 Application control: single or multitasked, distributed computing

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Environmental Evolution (3/5)
 2D bitmap raster displays for PCs and workstations
(1972 at Xerox PARC - now)
 Display: windows, icons, legible text, “flat earth” graphics
 Object and command specification: minimal typing via
WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) GUI
 Control over appearance: WYSIWYG (which is really
WYSIAYG, What You See Is All You Get)
 Application control: multi-tasking, networked client-
server computation and window management (even “X
terminals”)

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Environmental Evolution (4/5)
 3D graphics workstations (1984 – now)
 Display: real-time, pseudo-realistic images of 3D
scenes
 Object and command specification: 2D, 3D and N-D
input devices (controlling 3+ degrees of freedom)
and force feedback haptic devices for point-and-
Graphics workstations such as
click, widgets, and direct manipulation these have been replaced with
 Control over appearance: WYSIWYG (still WYSIAYG) commodity hardware (GPUs)

 Application control: multi-tasking, networked

(client/server) computation and window
management

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Environmental Evolution (5/5)
 High-end PCs with hot graphics cards (nVidia GeForce™,
ATI Radeon™) have supplanted graphics workstations
 Such PCs are clustered together over
high speed buses or LANs to provide
“scalable graphics”
 Now accessible to consumers via
new technologies like NVIDIA’s You can put multiple
SLI (Scalable Link Interface) bridge GPUs together in your
computer using SLI.

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Graphics Display Hardware
Vector (calligraphic, stroke, Raster (TV, bitmap, pixmap) used in displays
random-scan) and laser printers
 Driven by display commands (move (x,  Driven by array of pixels (no semantics,
y), char(“A”) , line(x, y)…) lowest form of representation)
 Survives as “scalable vector graphics”  Note “jaggies” (aliasing errors) due to
sampling continuous primitives

Ideal Vector Raster Outline Filled

Drawing Drawing

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Graphics Display Hardware

Vector graphics Bitmap graphics

Graphics Display Hardware

Bitmap graphics
Bitmap vs. Vector graphics
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Bitmap vs. vector graphics

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Conceptual Framework for Interactive Graphics
 Graphics library/package is intermediary between application and
display hardware (Graphics System)
 Application program maps application objects to views (images) of
those objects by calling on graphics library
 User interaction results in modification of model and/or image

Software Hardware

Graphics
System/
Application Graphics GPU
Application
Library
Model / database program

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Graphics Library
 Examples: OpenGL™, DirectX™, Windows Presentation Foundation™
(WPF), RenderMan™, HTML5+WebGL
 Primitives (characters, lines, polygons, meshes,…)
 Attributes
 Color, line style, material properties for 3D
 Lights
 Transformations

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Application Distinctions: Two Basic Paradigms
 Sample-based graphics: discrete samples
are used to describe visual information
 pixels can be created by digitizing
images, using a sample-based “painting”
program, etc.
 often some aspect of the physical world
is sampled for visualization, e.g.,
temperature across a country
 example programs: Adobe Photoshop™,
GIMP™ , Adobe AfterEffects™, etc

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Application Distinctions: Two Basic Paradigms
 Geometry-based graphics : geometrical model
is created, along with various appearance
attributes, and is then sampled for
visualization (rendering a.k.a image synthesis)
 often some aspect of physical world is visually
simulated, or “synthesized”
 examples of 2D apps: Adobe Illustrator™, Adobe
Freehand™, Corel CorelDRAW™
 examples of 3D apps: Autodesk’s AutoCAD™,
Autodesk’s (formerly Alias|Wavefront’s) Maya™,
Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max™

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Sampling an Image

3D scene

 A color value is measured at every grid point and used to color corresponding
grid square 0 = white, 5 = gray, 10 = black

 Poor sampling and image reconstruction method creates blocky image

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What’s the Advantage?
 Once image is defined in terms of colors at (x, y)
locations on grid, can change image easily by
altering location or color values
 E.g., if we reverse our mapping above and make 10 =
white and 0 = black, the image would look like this:

 Pixel information from one image can be copied

and pasted into another, replacing or combining
with previously stored pixels

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 What’s the Disadvantage?
 WYSIAYG (What You See Is All You Get): No additional
information
 no depth information
 can’t examine scene from different point of view
 at most can play with the individual pixels or groups of
pixels to change colors, enhance contrast, find edges, etc.

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Geometry-Based Graphics
 Geometry-based graphics applications store mathematical descriptions,
or “models,” of geometric elements (lines, polygons, polyhedrons…) and
associated attributes (e.g., color, material properties)

 Elements are primitive geometric shapes, primitives for short

 Images of many different views can be generated from same model

 As user manipulates geometric elements, program resamples and

redisplays elements
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What is Geometric Modeling?
 What is a model?
 Captures salient features (data, behavior) of thing/phenomenon being
modeled
 data includes geometry, appearance, attributes…
 Similarity to OOP ideas
 Real: some geometry inherent
 physical (e.g., actual object such as a chair)
 non-physical (e.g., mathematical function, weather data)
 Abstract: no inherent geometry, but for visualization
 organizational (e.g., company org. chart)
 quantitative (e.g., graph of stock market)
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Modeling vs. Rendering
 Modeling
 Rendering
 Create models Take “picture” with camera
 Apply materials to models
 Place models around scene  Both can be done with commercial software:
 Place lights in scene
 Place the camera Autodesk MayaTM ,3D Studio MaxTM, BlenderTM, etc.

Point Light

Spot
Light
Directional Light
Ambient
Light

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