Advanced Graphics

Universiteit Utrecht - Information and Computing Sciences

academic year 2021/22 – 2nd block
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Format & Organization

Lecture Slides

Practicals

Literature & Links

Newsback to navigation

Recent news


Jan 27:

Jan 19:

  • Lecture slides for lecture 14 and recording of lectures 13 now available.

Jan 17:

  • Lectures are ON CAMPUS again! Tomorrow: BBG-214.
  • Attending online (live!) is also a fine option.
  • Lecture slides for lecture 13 and recording of lectures 11 and 12 now available.

Jan 13:

  • Assignment 3 specification is now final, see updated document (with minor changes).

Older posts are still available here.

Format and Organizationback to navigation

Overview

The master course Advanced Graphics addresses advanced topics in 3D computer graphics. The focus of the course is Physically-based rendering of 3D scenes. The course has two main focus areas: Rendering Algorithms and Making Rendering More Efficient. Efficiency will be sought through Acceleration Structure Construction and Traversal and Variance Reduction (rather than low level optimization).

The course starts with a recap of Whitted-style ray tracing. We then explore various acceleration structures that help to run the ray tracing algorithm in real-time on commodity hardware. We will see that a well-built Bounding Volume Hierarchy provides both flexibility and speed, for static and dynamic scenes.

The second part of the course introduces the path tracing algorithm, and related light transport theory. We investigate various methods to improve the efficiency of the algorithm using probability theory. We will see that efficient path tracing can yield interactive frame rates.

In the third part of the course we use GPGPU to run ray tracing and path tracing on the GPU. We will explore recent research in high performance stochastic rendering.


Course objectives

At the end of this course you will have detailed knowledge about the following topics:
  • physical light transport, and how to simulate this behavior in a computer program;
  • modern ray tracing based rendering algorithms;
  • high level optimizations of the ray tracing algorithm;
  • Monte Carlo integration and variance reduction;
  • GPU-specific optimizations of ray tracing algorithms.

You will have practical experience in the following topics:

  • implementation of Whitted-style ray tracing and path tracing;
  • implementation of acceleration structure construction and traversal.

You will have a reasonable grasp of several related topics:

  • distributed ray tracing;
  • bidirectional methods, including photon mapping;
  • filtering of the noisy output of a path tracer;
  • RTX, OptiX, Embree and RadeonRays;
  • SIMD and ray packet traversal.


LINKS

  • Osiris: the official (centrally managed) schedule.
  • www.cs.uu.nl: uniform course information.
  • Join us on Teams for support and collaboration.


PEOPLE

Lecturer: Jacco Bikker (j.bikker@uu.nl)


LectureS

  • Two lectures per week: Tuesday 11:00 - 12:45, Thursday 13:15 - 15:00.
  • Two lecturer supervised lab per week: Tuesday 9:00 - 10:45, Thursday 15:15 - 17:00.
  • Labs are in the room that is scheduled for the lecture on the same day.

We will try to record the lectures for those that cannot be physically on campus.

Practicals

This course has a practical project track. During this course, you will either develop an interactive renderer, your own render core for Lighthouse 2, or a path tracer within a voxel framework. You may work on the project alone, or with one other student. The practical project has three milestones. The second and third milestones build on the previous one: the outcome is a full ray tracer or render core, which makes a great addition to your portfolio.

Final Exam

There will be one exam at the end of the block (i.e., no mid-term exam). A retake exam or retake assignment can be used to compensate some deficits (see grading section for details).


Prerequisites

  • Basic knowledge in linear algebra, calculus and probability theory, as required for the masters program. See "Elementary maths for GMT".
  • Fundamentals in algorithms and data structures.
  • Bachelor level knowledge in computer graphics is strongly recommended. Without prior graphics knowledge, you will need substantial additional time (and probably some talent).
  • Good programming skills; C# and C++ will both work, but for optimal performance and certain low level aspects, C++ is recommended. Plan for additional time if you plan to familiarize yourself with C++ during the course.
  • Good to have, but not absolutely required: basic experience with graphics programming (e.g. OpenGL / DirectX). Note that we will not use an API for the assignments; we'll build our own.
 

Topics
Ray Tracing

Whitted-style Ray Tracing

  • Recap
  • Beer's Law, Fresnel

Acceleration Structures

  • Octree, kD-tree, BSP
  • Bounding Volume Hierarchy
  • Efficient Construction & Traversal

Dynamic Scenes

  • The Top-Level BVH

Real-time

  • Ray Packet Traversal
 
Path Tracing

Light Transport

  • The Rendering Equation

Monte-Carlo Algorithms

  • Distributed Ray Tracing
  • Path Tracing

Variance Reduction

  • Stratification
  • Importance Sampling
  • Next Event Estimation

Interactive

  • Multi-branching BVHs
 
Efficiency

GPU implementations

  • Streaming Algorithms
  • Wavefront Path Tracing

Variance reduction

  • Multiple Importance Sampling
  • Resampled Importance Sampling
  • Bi-directional Path Tracing
  • Photon Mapping

Image Postprocessing

  • Bias
  • Filtering Techniques

Scheduleback to navigation

BLOCK 2 Schedule

Week Date Lecture / Exams Working College Practical #1 Practical #2 Practical #3
46 Tue Nov 16
11:00-12:45
 NO LECTURE
        
Thu Nov 18
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 1 (in: BBG-001)
Introduction
        
47 Tue Nov 23
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 2 (in: BBG-083)
Whitted Ray Tracing
 Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45

Assignment 1
Basic framework

    
Thu Nov 25
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 3 (in: DDW-1.30)
Acceleration Structures
 Working College
Thu 15:15-17:00		    
48 Tue Nov 30
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 4 (in: BBG-214)
Light Transport / intro 		Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45		    
Thu Dec 2
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 5 (in: DDW-1.30)
Perfect BVHs / future work 		Working College
Thu 15:15-17:00		    
49 Tue Dec 7
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 6 (in: BBG-214)
Path Tracing
 		Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45		 Deadline:
Wednesday Dec 8, 17:00

Assignment 2:

Acceleration structures
or:
Path Tracing

  asfasd 
Thu Dec 9
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 7 (in: DDW-1.30)
GPU Ray Tracing (1) 		Working College
Thu 15:15-17:00		  
50 Tue Dec 14
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 8 (in: BBG-214)
Variance Reduction (1)
 		Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45		    
Thu Dec 16
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 9 (in: DDW-1.30)
Variance Reduction (2) 		Working College
Thu 15:15-17:00 		   
51
 Tue Dec 21
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 10 (in: BBG-214)
GPU Ray Tracing (2) 		Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45		  

Assignment 3:

Specialize
Thu Dec 23
13:15-17:00
NO LECTURE
  Deadline:
Thu Dec 23, 17:00h
52,1
 Christmas, New Year, Holidays

2 Tue Jan 11
11:00-12:45
Lecture 11 (ONLINE / TEAMS)
Various / quick gains
 Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45 		   
Thu Jan 13
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 12 (ONLINE / TEAMS)
Probability / tl;dr / P3 topics
 Working College
Thu 15:15-17:00 		   
3
 Tue Jan 18
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 13 (in: BBG-214)
Bidirectional / challenges 		Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45 		   
Thu Jan 20
13:15-17:00		 Lecture 14 (in: DDW-1.30)
TAA & ReSTIR 		Working College
Thu 15:15-17:00 		   
4
 Tue Jan 25
11:00-12:45		 Lecture 15 (in: BBG-214)
Learning GI 		Working College
Tue 9:00-10:45
    
Thu Jan 27
13:15-17:00
Lecture 16 (in: DDW-1.30)
Bits & pieces / exam
   

Block 2 Exam
  Thu Feb 3, 17:00 - 19:00 in EDUC-ALFA
 Deadline:
Wed Feb 2, 17:00h

 

Downloadsback to navigation

LECTURE SLIDES and RECORDINGS

Subsequent lectures will be made available during the course.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

The 2018/2019 exam, with answers.
The 2017/2018 exam, with answers.
The 2016/2017 exam, with answers.
The 2015/2016 exam, with answers.

More will be made available in Teams.


FILES

Generic C/C++ / OpenCL template: advgrtmpl8 (from the github repo)
Cross-platform C/C++ template, no OpenCL support: tmpl_2019_v2.zip
Generic C# template: template_csharp.zip
GPGPU / OpenCL / C# template: tmpl_OCL_Csharp_2018.zip


RENDERERS

Lighthouse 2 can be found on GitHub.
VoxelWorld template is also available on GitHub.

Practical Assignmentsback to navigation

The course includes a software project that should be worked on in pairs. It is allowed to work on this alone, but be aware that the scope of the project is tuned for duos.

There are three milestones for this project:

  1.  Basics: during the first phase of the project, you will design and implement a Whitted-style ray tracer, either built on your own framework, or as a render core for the Lighthouse 2 renderer.
  2.  Interactivity: based on the theory, you will transform the Whitted-style ray tracer into an interactive renderer. The renderer is extended with basic animation support.
  3.  For the final version of your project, you will be adding global illumination to the renderer. The default approach for this is a path tracer; however other options exist as well. You are free to chose your specific focus in this phase of the project, e.g. GPU rendering or advanced variance reduction.

The final grade for the software project is calculated as follows:

practical grade = (P1 + P2 + 2 * P3) / 4
(1) Ray Tracer

Tasks:

  • Setup a basic ray tracing framework for rendering a depth map for a hard-coded scene consisting of spheres and planes
  • Implement a complete Whitted-style ray tracer with reflection and optionally refraction (Fresnel) and absorption (Beer)

Download the official assignment description (v2).
 
(2) Interactive Ray Tracer

Tasks:

  • Add a bounding volume hierarchy
  • Optional: add a top-level BVH
  • Optional: add ray packet traversal
  • Other optional challenges available.

Download the official assignment description (updated from draft).

 
(3) Global Illumination

Tasks (tentative):

  • Implement recent research in the field of graphics
  • Build a GPU ray tracer or path tracer.
  • Implement a real-time ray tracer for animated scenes.
  • Other challenges are available.

Download the official assignment description (updated from draft).


Gradingback to navigation

GRADING

In order to pass the course, you must meet these requirements:

Practical grade P = (P1 + P2 + 2 * P3) / 4
Exam grade E
Final grade F = (2 * P + E) / 3

Where

P >= 4.5
E >= 4.5
F >= 5.5.

RETAKES AND REQUIREMENTS

There will be an opportunity for a retake exam or a retake assignment. In order to qualify, a grade of at least 4.0 is required in both areas (final exam, practicals). The retake exam or assignment replaces the matching exam or assignment.

IMPORTANT: you can only take the retake exam if you have both a high-enough but non-passing grade (i.e., at least 4.0 and less than 5.5).


Transfers from the previous lecture

If you are retaking this course it may be possible to transfer partial grades to this academic year. This is only possible for practical assignment grades; if you are retaking Advanced Graphics, you must retake the exam. Contact me for details.

Literature & Linksback to navigation

LITERATURE

  • T. Whitted. An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display. Commun. ACM, 23(6):343–349, 1980.
  • Interactive Rendering with Coherent Ray Tracing, Wald et al., 2001.
  • Large Ray Packets for Real-time Whitted Ray Tracing, Overbeck et al., 2008.
  • Fast Agglomerative Clustering for Rendering, Walter et al., 2008.
  • Heuristics for Ray Tracing using Space Subdivision, MacDonald & Booth, 1990.
  • Distributed Ray Tracing, Cook et al., 1984.
  • The Rendering Equation, Kajiya, 1986.
  • Importance Sampling for Production Rendering, pages 5-38.
  • Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware. Purcell et al., 2002.
  • Interactive k-d tree GPU raytracing. Horn et al., 2007.
  • Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Tracing on GPUs. Aila & Laine, 2009.
  • Getting Rid of Packets - Efficient SIMD Single-Ray Traversal using Multi-branching BVHs. Wald et al., 2008.
  • Megakernels Considered Harmfull: Wavefront Path Tracing on GPUs. Laine et al., 2013.
  • Theory for Off-Specular Reflection from Roughened Surfaces. Torrance & Sparrow, 1967.

Recommended literature

Physically Based Rendering - From Theory to Implementation, Third Edition, Pharr & Humphreys. Morgan Kaufmann, 2016. ISBN-10: 9780128006450. Also available for free online: www.pbrt-book.org.

PAPERS & ONLINE MATERIALS

Additional materials will be posted here in due time.

News Archiveback to navigation

Old posts


Dec 23:

  • Lecture 9 and 10 videos have been added to the downloads section.
  • On Teams you can find the assignment 3 description, in concept.

Dec 15:

  • Lecture 8 slides now updated with lecture 9 content.
  • Lecture 8 videos available for download.
  • Some changes to the schedule to be prepared for assignment 2 sooner.

Dec 13:

  • Lecture 8 slides are available for download.
  • Lecture 7 recording now available.

Dec 8:

Dec 7:

  • Recordings for lecture 6 have been uploaded.
  • Slides for lecture 6 have been updated to v2 (small fixes).

Dec 3:

  • Recordings for lecture 5 have been uploaded.
  • Added slides for lecture 6 ("Path Tracing").

Dec 2:

Nov 30:

Nov 24:

  • Slides for lecture 3 are already available, as requested.

Nov 23:

  • Slides and recordings for lecture 2 now available.
  • Assignment 1 has been updated: the voxel template option is now discussed separately.

Nov 19:

Nov 13:

  • Tuesday 16 lecture CANCELLED. We start Thursday November 18.

Nov 9:

Nov 5:

Oct 28:

  • 2021/2022 version of the website ready for publication.
  • Announcements will be made in Teams. They will be mirrored here.