Special Topics Course CIS 700 Procedural Graphics

Week 1: Noise

Introduction to procedural graphics and Canvas with Javascript. Pseudo-random noise techniques. Perlin Noise.

Reading:

• Ken Perlin, An image synthesizer, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.19 n.3, p.287-296, Jul. 1985;
• Ken Perlin. 2002. Improving noise. ACM Trans. Graph. 21, 3 (July 2002), 681-682.

Assignment:

• Structured Noise: Using Javascript, generate 3D structured noise in a shader to create a 3D, animated cloud..

Additional Reference:

• Lagae, A., Lefebvre, S., Cook, R., DeRose, T., Drettakis, G., Ebert, D., Lewis, J.P., Perlin, K., Zwicker, M., "A Survey of Procedural Noise Functions," Computer Graphics Forum, 2010.

Week 2: Distribution and Sampling

Working with workhorse growth functions and interpolation methods. Creating distributions. Point-scattering. World-brush. Voronoi diagrams.

Reading:

• Arnaud Emilien , Ulysse Vimont , Marie-Paule Cani , Pierre Poulin , Bedrich Benes, WorldBrush: interactive example-based synthesis of procedural virtual worlds, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.34 n.4, August 2015

Assignment:

• Realistic Feather Distribution: Procedurally create a model of a feathered wing, using various interpolation methods to place the feathers.

Week 3: L-systems

The basics of string replacement systems. Designing and parsing simple grammars.

Reading:

• Stephen Demko, Laurie Hodges, and Bruce Naylor. 1985. Construction of fractal objects with iterated function systems. In SIGGRAPH '85

Assignment:

• Plant Generation: Use L-systems and random number generators to create a complex 3D plant model of your own design.

Additional Reference:

• "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants", Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer

Week 4: Extending L-systems

Moving on from strings. Shape grammars and additions to L-systems. Applications for urban environments.

Reading:

• Pascal Muller , Peter Wonka , Simon Haegler , Andreas Ulmer , Luc Van Gool, Procedural modeling of buildings, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.25 n.3, July 2006

Assignment

• Applying L-Systems to City Generation: Dynamically generate buildings and street layouts to create a 3D model of a city.

Week 5: Color

Cell-shading, color compression, color space mapping.

Reading:

• T.-W. Chen, Y.-L. Chen, and S.-Y. Chien. Fast image segmentation based on k-means clustering with histograms in hsv color space. In Multimedia Signal Processing, 2008 IEEE 10th Workshop on, pages 322 –325, 2008.

Assignment:

• One-Color Challenge: Using each color in the RGB32 gamut exactly once, create a visualization of a common computer science algorithm of your choice.

Week 6: Implicit Surfaces

Marching cubes, procedural geometry synthesis equations and constructed solid geometry.

Reading:

• "A Generalization of Algebraic Surface Drawing." ACM Transactions on Graphics, July 1982.

Assignment:

• Cloudy With a Chance of Metaballs: Create an animated implicit surface using oscillating signed distance fields.

Week 7: Procedural Textures

Revisiting and combining procedural concepts to create unique procedural textures.

Assignment:

• Substance Designer or Houdini.

Week 8: Intro to Dynamics

Overview of rigid body dynamics and cloth simulation.

Reading:

• D. Baraff and A. Witkin. Dynamic simulation of non-penetrating flexible bodies. Computer Graphics 26(2): 303-308, 1992.
• J. Linford and T. Moh. Parallelized rigid body dynamics. ACM SE 2014

Assignment:

• The Art of Chaos: Using rigid body physics to distribute various objects, create a 3D work of art.

Week 9: Intro to Crowd simulation

The basics of autonomous agents. Collision avoidance approaches.

Reading:

• Pelechano, Nuria, Jan M. Allbeck, and Norman I. Badler. "Controlling individual agents in high-density crowd simulation." Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation. Eurographics Association, 2007;

• Reynolds, Craig W. "Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model." ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics 21.4 (1987): 25-34.

Assignment: Agent Avoidance: Program basic agent AIs to avoid one another and obstacles on their way to various goals.

Week 10: Behavioral Animation

Injecting personality and purpose into autonomous agents.

Reading:

• Braitenberg, V. (1984). Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Assignment:

• "I saw a mudcrab the other day. Wretched creatures.": Create an artificial life demo using the Braitenberg model built on top of the collision avoidance agent simulation developed in the previous assignment.

Week 11: Introduction to ShaderToy

Review of OpenGL pipeline and GLSL programming.

Assignment: Raymarching in ShaderToy: Use OpenGL via ShaderToy to render 3D surfaces based on polynomial functions.

Week 12: Special Topics

TBD

Week 13: Special Topics

TBD

Week 14: Final Project worktime

Troubleshooting tips and open worktime in class.