lecture1 introduction to computer graphics(Computer graphics tutorials)

CSC 406:CSC 406:
Computer GraphicsComputer Graphics
Lecture1:
IntroductionIntroduction

January 2008 CSC 406 : Computer Graphics 2
Lecture 1:
 Scope:
 Introduction.
 Historic overview.
 Graphics hardware and software
 CG components
 Study question:
 What is computer graphics?
 State three landmark events in the development of computer
graphics.
 State the components of computer graphics.

What is Computer Graphics:
 Technically, it’s about the production,
manipulation and display of images using
computers
 Practically, it’s about movies, games, art,
training, advertising, communication, design,
…

Historic Overview:Historic Overview:
 The development of computer graphics can
be viewed in three aspects:
 Pre-historic events that are useful in this
development.
 Development in Software and Algorithms.
 Development in hardware, and graphics
technology.
 We look at details in later lectures…

Pre-History:- Before
graphics:
 The foundations of computer graphics can be traced
to artistic and mathematical ``inventions,'' for
example,
 Euclid (circa 300 - 250 BC) who's formulation of
geometry provides a basis for graphics concepts.
 Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 - 1446) architect, goldsmith,
and sculptor who is noted for his use of perspective.

Pre-history…
 Rene Descartés (1596-1650) who developed analytic geometry, in
particular coordinate systems which provide a foundation for describing
the location and shape of objects in space.
 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and Issac Newton (1642 -
1727) who co-invented calculus that allow us to describe dynamical
systems.
 James Joseph Sylvester (1814 - 1897) who invented matrix notation. A
lot of graphics can be done with matrices.
 I. Schoenberg who discovered splines, a fundamental type of curve.
 J. Presper Mauchly (1919 - 1995) and John William Mauchly (1907 -
1980) who build the ENIAC computer.

The Early history:
 The history of computer graphics can be dated back to the days of the
Whirlwind Project and the SAGE computer system, which were
designed to support military preparedness.
 The Whirlwind Project started as an effort to build a flight simulator and
SAGE was to provide a air defense system in the United States to guard
against the threat of a nuclear attack.
 The SAGE workstation had a vector display and light pens that operators
would use pinpoint planes flying over regions of the United States.
 Besides being the age of the first vacuum tube computers, the 1940's
was when the transistor was invented at Bell Labs (1947).
 In 1956, the first transistorized computer was built at MIT.

Hardware and Technology:Hardware and Technology:
 The age of Sutherlands:
 In the early 1960's IBM, Sperry-Rand, Burroughs and a few
other computer companies existed.
 The computers of the day had a few kilobytes of memory,
no operating systems to speak of and no graphical display
monitors.
 The peripherals were punch cards, line printers, and roll-
paper plotters.
 The only programming languages supported were
assembler, FORTRAN, and Algol.
 Function graphs and ``Snoopy'' calendars were about the
only graphics done.

History – Hardware…
 In 1963 Ivan Sutherland presented his paper
Sketchpad at the Summer Joint Computer
Conference.
 Sketchpad allowed interactive design on a vector
graphics display monitor with a light pen input
device.
 Most people mark this event as the origin of
computer graphics.

Early 70’s…
 An Evans & Sutherland Picture System was
the high-end graphics computer.
 It was a vector display with hardware support for
clipping and perspective.
 Xerox PARC introduced the Altos personal
computer, and
 An 8 bit computer was invented at Intel.

Later in the 70’s…
 The Apple I and II computers became the first
commercial successes for personal computing.
 The DEC VAX computer was the mainframe (mini)
computer of choice.
 Arcade games such as Pong and Pac Mac became
popular.
 Laser printers were invented at Xerox PARC.

The early 80’s…
 The IBM PC was marketed in 1981 The Apple
MacIntosh started production in 1984, and
microprocessors began to take off, with the Intel
x86 chipset, but these were still toys.
 Computers with a mouse, bitmapped (raster)
display, and Ethernet became the standard in
academic and science and engineering settings.

 Sun workstations, with the Motorola 680x0 chipset became
popular as advanced workstation a in the mid 80's.
 The Video Graphics Array (VGA) card was invented at
IBM.
 Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations that supported real-
time raster line drawing and later polygons became the
computer graphicists desired.
 The data glove, a precursor to virtual reality, was invented
at NASA.
 VLSI for special purpose graphics processors and parallel
processing became hot research areas.

The 90’s…
 The computer at this time was an SGI workstation
with at least 16 MB of memory, at 24-bit raster
display with hardware support for Gouraud shading
and z-buffering for hidden surface removal.
 Laser printers and single frame video recorders
were standard.
 Unix, X and Silicon Graphics GL were the
operating systems, window system and application
programming interface (API) that graphicist used.

The 90’s…
 Shaded raster graphics were starting to be
introduced in motion pictures.
 PCs started to get decent, but still they could
not support 3-D graphics, so most
programmer's wrote software for scan
conversion (rasterization) used the painter's
algorithm for hidden surface removal, and
developed ``tricks'' for real-time animation.

The 90’s…
 Hand-held computers were invented at Hewlett-Packard about 1991.
 Zip drives were invented at Iomega.
 The Intel 486 chipset allowed PC to get reasonable floating point
performance.
 In 1994, Silicon Graphics produced the Reality Engine:
 It had hardware for real-time texture mapping.
 The Ninetendo 64 game console hit the market providing Reality
Engine-like graphics for the masses of games players.
 Scanners were introduced.

 PC graphics cards, for example 3dfx and Nvidia,
were introduced.
 Laptops were introduced to the market.
 The Pentium chipset made PCs almost as powerful
as workstations.
 Motion capture, begun with the data glove,
becomes a primary method for generating
animation sequences.

The 90’s…
 3-D video games become very popular: DOOM
(which uses BSP trees), Quake, Mario Brothers, etc.
 Graphics effects in movies becomes pervasive:
Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Titanic,
Star Wars I. Virtual reality and the Virtual Reality
Meta (Markup) Language (VRML) become hot
areas for research.
 PDA's, the Palm Pilot, and flat panel displays hit
the market.

The ’00’s…
 Today most graphicist want an Intel PC with at least 256 MB of memory
and a 10 GB hard drive.
 Their display should have graphics board that supports real-time texture
mapping.
 A flatbed scanner, color laser printer, digital video camera, DVD, and
MPEG encoder/decoder are the peripherals one wants.
 The environment for program development is most likely Windows and
Linux, with Direct 3D and OpenGL, but Java 3D might become more
important.
 Programs are typically written in C++ or Java.

Software and Algorithms:Software and Algorithms:
The 60’s
 Jack Bresenham taught us how to draw lines on a raster
device.
 He later extended this to circles. Anti-aliased lines and curve
drawing is a major topic in computer graphics.
 Larry Roberts pointed out the usefulness of homogeneous
coordinates, matrices and hidden line detection algorithms.
 Steve Coons introduced parametric surfaces and developed
early computer aided geometric design concepts.

The 60’s…
 The earlier work of Pierre Bézier on parametric
curves and surfaces also became public.
 Author Appel at IBM developed hidden surface and
shadow algorithms that were pre-cursors to ray
tracing.
 The fast Fourier transform was discovered by
Cooley and Tukey.
 This algorithm allow us to better understand signals and
is fundamental for developing antialiasing techniques.
 It is also a precursor to wavelets.

The 70’s…
 Rendering (shading) were discovered by Gouraud and
Phong at the University of Utah.
 Phong also introduced a reflection model that included specular
highlights.
 Keyframe based animation for 3-D graphics was
demonstrated.
 Xerox PARC developed a ``paint'' program.
 Ed Catmull introduced parametric patch rendering, the z-
buffer algorithm, and texture mapping.
 BASIC, C, and Unix were developed at Dartmouth and Bell
Labs.

 Turned Whitted developed recursive ray
tracing and it became the standard for
photorealism.
 Pascal was the programming language
everyone learned.

The 80’s…
 Jim Blinn introduces blobby models and texture
mapping concepts.
 Binary space partitioning (BSP) trees were
introduced as a data structure.
 Loren Carpenter started exploring fractals in
computer graphics.
 Postscript was developed by John Warnock and
Adobe was formed.
 Steve Cook introduced stochastic sampling to ray
tracing.

The 80’s…
 Radiosity was introduced by the Greenberg and folks at
Cornell.
 Photoshop was marketed by Adobe.
 Video arcade games took off, many people/organizations
started publishing on the desktop.
 Unix and X windows were the platforms of choice with
programming in C and C++, but MS-DOS was starting to
rise.

The 80’s…
 Mosaic, the first graphical Internet browser was
written by xxx at the University of Illinois, National
Center for Scientific Applications (NCSA).
 MPEG standards for compressed video began to be
promulgated.
 Dynamical systems (physically based modeling)
that allowed animation with collisions, gravity,
friction, and cause and effects were introduced.

The 80’s…
 In 1992 OpenGL became the standard for
graphics APIs
 In 1993, the World Wide Web took off.
 Surface subdivision algorithms were
rediscovered.
 Wavelets begin to be used in computer
graphics.

The 90’s…
 Image based rendering became the area for
research in photo-realistic graphics.
 Linux and open source software become
popular.

Future???…
 You should expect 3-D modeling and video
editing for the masses, computer vision for
robotic devices and capture facial
expressions, and realistic rendering of
difficult things like a human face, hair, and
water.

Graphics Software
 Two general classifications of graphics
software:
 General programming packages
 Special purpose application packages

Graphics Software…
Many application programs are
available to produce computer graphics,
either as 2D images, 3D models, or
animated sequences.
 These include Corel Draw, Photoshop,
AutoCAD, Maya, SoftImage, etc.

Graphics Software…
 Several 'common' graphics
languages/libaries/APIs (Application
Programming Interfaces.)
o GKS
o DirectX
o X
o Postscript
o OpenGL

Why study computer graphics?
 Graphics is cool
 I like to see what I’m doing
 I like to show people what I’m doing
 Graphics is interesting
 Involves simulation, AI, algorithms, architecture…
 I’ll never get an Oscar for my acting
 But maybe I’ll get one for my CG special effects
 Graphics is fun

Component of Computer Graphics
 Modeling: Defining objects in terms of primitives, coordinates and
characteristics
 Storing: storing scenes and images in memory and on disk
 Manipulating: changing the shape, position and characteristics of
objects
 Rendering: applying physically based procedures to generate
(photorealistic) images from scenes (using lighting and shading)
 Viewing: displaying images from various viewpoints on various devices

Next Lecture…
 Graphics Hardware

lecture1 introduction to computer graphics(Computer graphics tutorials)

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