Nederlands is de voertaal in de colleges en communicatie van deze cursus. Er wordt verwacht dat studenten Nederlands spreken.
Docenten die nog Nederlands aan het leren zijn, kunnen Engels praten. Cursusmateriaal en tentamens zijn Engelstalig.

Dutch is the instructional language in the delivery and communications of this course. Students are expected to speak Dutch.
Teachers who are still learning Dutch, may speak English instead. Course materials and exams will be in English.

Math: 2D Geometry and Algebra, equivalent to 'vwo Wiskunde B' in Dutch secondary education. This course includes a quick recap of these topics but prior knowledge is expected.

Programming: Ideally in C#, for example from the courses INFOB1GP or INFOIMP. This course requires that you can already program fluently. This course does not teach any programming. During this course there is not enough time to learn the necessary programming.

Course: "Graphics" is an introductory course about computer graphics. Computer graphics deals with the algorithmic processing of visual (images) and spatial (geometry) data. The course will focus on the very basics of modeling and rendering, i.e., the mathematical description of three-dimensional scenes and how to create (realistic) images of such models.

Rendering Algorithms: We have several options to convert the mathematical representation of a virtual world into a digital image. Modern games typically rely on the z-buffer algorithm. An alternative approach is ray tracing. In this course we will explore both methods. Ray tracing allows us to produce 'correct' images; rasterization lets us approximate this in real-time.

Math: An important aspect of computer graphics is the use of mathematics. This course provides a short coverage of the mathematical basics needed for rendering. We will introduce fundamental concepts of linear algebra and other areas of higher mathematics that are important far beyond the field of graphics.

The information on this website is static; announcements and discussions will be on Microsoft Teams. Please join the Team using the code that you can find on Blackboard.

This course takes place offline only, in person. Please join us on campus!
We expect that most of our communication will be offline during the lectures and tutorial sessions. Please use Teams as a way to interact with each other and with us, but we may not be able to respond quickly to Teams questions.

This course will be taught in English.

Lecturers:     (email both of us if you have a personal question that cannot be asked in Teams)

•   Peter Vangorp (p.vangorp@uu.nl)
  
•   Tamara Mchedlidze (t.mtsentlintze@uu.nl)
  

Student Assistants:

•   Jens Steenmetz
•   Sybren Lange
•   Robin Schenkels
•   Quân Tran
•   Mathieu Chappin
•   Hugo Krul
•   Tijmen Vis
•   Benjamin Blankers
  

Teaching Assistants:

•   Victor Stenvers
•   Ethan Waterink
  

If you need to skip or postpone a deadline or an exam for any reason (e.g., health, family), the Education and Examination Regulations (EER) (degree-specific appendices) describe the following procedure:

Send an email to your study advisor, cc: the course coordinator (p.vangorp@uu.nl), as early as possible. This email should contain the following information:

• Your name and student number
• The affected course
• The date and time of the affected exam or assignment deadline
• Brief reason (no sensitive details needed in this initial email)
• Your specific request, e.g., N days extension, or skip and do the retake
• Ask the study advisor to send their recommendation to the course coordinator directly. (Your study advisor may not be aware of this step in the procedure!)

If necessary, the study advisor may discuss sensitive details with you in confidence. The course coordinator will confirm the outcome.

Period 4 Schedule

• You are supposed to work alone on the exercises, for the reason that they prepare you for the exam, which is also individual.
• As much as possible, you are expected to prepare the solution for the exercises before the tutorial session. So, for example, before the tutorial session on April 22 you should have finished as many exercises on Vectors as you can with your prior math knowledge.
• Presence at the Math tutorial sessions (certain Tuesdays and Thursdays, immediately after the lecture) is mandatory, as solutions for a selection of exercises will be discussed and you will get a chance to ask questions.
• Please use the Teams channel "Math Tutorials" to ask questions about the exercises but only do this in two cases:
  • if for some good reason you were not able to attend the corresponding Math tutorial session, or
  • if you don't understand the question of the exercise.
  Make sure your question is concise and suitably specific. We cannot help you if you just state ‘I do not understand this exercise’.

PRACTICAL ASSIGNMENTS

There will be two practical assignments, covering the two main rendering algorithms: ray tracing (P1) and rasterization (P2). A suggested programming template for P1 will be available on the first day of the course. We recommend that you start familiarizing yourself with it right away.

Important Rules

Because of the large group of students taking this course, we need strict rules to keep everything manageable.

• Presence at the Practicals Support sessions (certain Tuesdays and Thursdays, immediately after the lecture) is strongly recommended. During these sessions, you should bring your laptop so you can work on the practicals and get help from your classmates and from us.

• Working in teams: The programming assignments are designed for groups of three students. You may however also work on the assignments in a group of two or alone. Details:
  
  • Working in a group of two or alone: There is no penalty for working in a group of two or alone on the assignments, but you will be expected to complete the same amount of work as a three-person team. It is however not allowed to work in a team of four or more students.
    
  • Building groups: You can choose your teammates yourself among your fellow students. If you cannot find teammates on your own, ask on the Teams channel "Finding Teammates" or during the tutorial sessions. We will help you to team up with other students.
  • If a teammate drops the course: This is a risk of working in groups. You may continue working with the materials that you produced together. However, you cannot continue working on these materials with a new teammate.
  • Project team responsibility: It is up to you how you split the work among your team members. However, this freedom comes at the price that you have to be prepared for situations such as team members dropping the course or not delivering what they promised to you. It is your responsibility to make sure that you are aware of your team's progress, so you can react to such issues in an appropriate way.

• Plagiarism:

• We use an automated plagiarism detection system. Suspected plagiarism must always be reported to the exam board and may have severe consequences.

• Do not store or share your projects publicly, e.g., in a public GitHub repository. If your code is found and used by another team, you may be complicit in their plagiarism and also face consequences. Sharing ideas is fine, of course.

• We recognize the value of AI assistive technologies for programming such as ChatGPT or Copilot to understand and improve code. However, such tools tend to produce code that they have copied ("learned") from online sources. If that's more than a few lines of code, that will likely be detected as plagiarism and will be treated as such.

Soft- / Hardware and Infrastructure:

• Required equipment: For the practicals, you need a Windows PC with Visual Studio. The free Community Edition of Visual Studio 2022 is a good platform for C# development. We will be using the open-source OpenTK library to access OpenGL from C#.
  
• Alternative platforms: For this course, support will be mostly limited to Microsoft Windows and C#. You may of course use alternative platforms and programming languages, but an appropriate level of autonomy is expected in that case.
  
  

Assignment P1

This assignment is all about ray tracing. You can find all the details in the formal assignment description.

Please find the following Files on Teams:

• C# / OpenTK template
• Assignment description including optional honours assignment (pdf)
  

• Monday, May 26, 17:00 (hard deadline, late submissions will not be graded)
• Hand-in on Blackboard
  

Assignment P2

For this final assignment, you will be creating a small OpenGL-based rasterizer engine. Details are in the formal assignment description.

Please find the following Files on Teams:

• C# / OpenTK template with post-processing example
  
• Assignment description (pdf)
  

• Friday, June 27, 17:00 (hard deadline, late submissions will not be graded)
• Hand-in on Blackboard
  

GRADING

Programming assignments: There will be two programming assignments throughout the course. The final grade P for your programming assignments is the average of the two grades for the assignments: P = (P1+P2)/2. P must be at least 5.0 (before rounding) to pass the course.

Exams: There will be a midterm exam T1 and a final exam T2. The final grading T for your exams is calculated as follows: T = 0.3*T1 + 0.7*T2. T must be at least 5.0 (before rounding) to pass the course.

Final grade: If both T (= the grade for the exams) and P (= the programming grade) are at least 5.0, the final grade for the course is (T + P) / 2. Your final grade must be at least 6 (after rounding) to pass the course.

RETAKES AND REQUIREMENTS

You are entitled to participate in one retake if:

• you participated in all graded assignments and exams and your final grade was at least 4.0 but less than 6 (after rounding); or
• you missed 1 graded assignment or exam and you obtained an exception by following the extension procedure.
  

This can either be a retake assignment or a retake exam. Criteria for passing stay the same as indicated above.

Retake final exam (T2): This exam will cover all lectures and tutorials.

Retake practical (P1 or P2): This retake assignment can replace either P1 or P2 and must be made individually, not as a group.

Textbook:

• The textbook of this course is Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley et al. The course is designed based on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions of the book. The basics (which we are covering) haven't changed much between those editions.
• Here is the web page of the text book.

Additional free online resources that might be helpful:

• Interactive linear algebra book: Immersive Math
• Linear algebra tutorial videos: Essence of Linear Algebra
  
• Linear algebra book: 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development
  
• Somewhat old ray tracing tutorial: Ray Tracing Topics & Techniques
• More recent ray tracing tutorial: Ray Tracing in One Weekend
• Graphics and OpenGL video lectures: Introduction to Computer Graphics
  
• Graphics online course: Interactive 3D Graphics
  
• Collection of tutorials on various graphics topics: Scratchapixel
  
• Graphics encyclopedia: The Graphics Codex
  
• Advanced ray tracing book: Physically Based Rendering
• Two books on advanced ray tracing topics: Ray Tracing Gems
• Advanced OpenGL book: Learn OpenGL Graphics Programming
• Older advanced graphics book: Principles of Digital Image Synthesis

About this course:

• 2014 Graphics course, by Michael Wand
  
• 2015 Graphics course, by Jacco Bikker
• 2016 Graphics course, by Jacco Bikker
• 2017 Graphics course, by Jacco Bikker and Deb Panja.
• 2018 Graphics course, by Jacco Bikker and Deb Panja.
• 2019 Graphics course, by Jacco Bikker and Deb Panja.
• 2020 Graphics course, by Jacco Bikker and Michael Behrisch.
• 2021 Graphics course, by Tamara Mchedlidze, Evanthia Dimara, and Jacco Bikker.
• 2022 Graphics course, by Tamara Mchedlidze and Peter Vangorp.
• 2023 Graphics course, by Peter Vangorp and Tamara Mchedlidze.