CS 430: Lecture 7 – Subprograms and Parameters
Dear students, Programs are recursive. They are built out of smaller chunks of code that are themselves programs. We call these smaller chunks of code subprograms. These subprograms organize our code into coherent pieces, with each piece solving a small computational task and deferring to other pieces as needed. We expect that we’ll write better […]
CS 488: Lecture 14 – Extra Texturing
Dear students: Last time we introduced texturing as a way of adding surface details without adding extra geometry. Textures are effectively our way of defining attributes at the fragment level. Today we extend our discussion of textures with a hodge podge of miscellaneous topics surrounding their use. Interpolation Suppose I have 3 cats at the […]
CS 488: Lecture 13 – Texture Mapping
Dear students: The temptation in computer graphics is to add more realism. We want the light to behave like real light, water to move like real water, and bodies to bend like real bodies. To make 3D shapes look more real, we might consider adding more triangles to give more geometric detail. More triangles mean […]
CS 488: Lecture 12 – Untransforming the Mouse
Dear students: Interactive graphics is funny because we work so hard to give the illusion of a full 3D world, but then we run this 2D cursor over it. As a human, you’ve probably experienced how hard it can be to figure out what someone is pointing at. Figuring out what the mouse is pointing […]
CS 488: Lab 7 – Camera
Welcome to lab, which is a place where you and your peers complete exercises designed to help you learn the ideas discussed in the preceding lectures. It is intended to be a time where you encounter holes in your understanding and talk out loud with your peers and instructor. Your instructor will bounce around between […]
CS 488: Lecture 11 – Blinn-Phong Illumination
Dear students: When we first implemented basic diffuse lighting, we considered just three pieces of information: the surface normal, a vector pointing toward the light source, and the surface’s base color or albedo. Today we’re going to complicate our lighting to bring in a lot more information. Lighting in Eye Space Last time we added […]
CS 430: Lecture 6 – Expressions and Control Structures
Dear students, The programs we write do many things: they facilitate communication, they walk a user through an interaction, they automate drudgery, they control physical artifacts, they store and retrieve data, and so on. Whatever a program’s final goal, many of its intermediate steps are concerned with producing and consuming information. This information is combined […]
CS 488: Lecture 10 – Camera
Dear students: All the renderers we’ve written so far have put a single object at the origin. The only thing we’ve done is spin that object around. It’s time to build up a larger world that the user can move around in. What new features of our graphics API do we need to construct an […]
CS 488: Lab 6 – Trackball
Welcome to lab, which is a place where you and your peers complete exercises designed to help you learn the ideas discussed in the preceding lectures. It is intended to be a time where you encounter holes in your understanding and talk out loud with your peers and instructor. Your instructor will bounce around between […]
CS 430: Lecture 5 – Haskell
Dear students, This class has hit upon several themes so far this semester. In week 1, we discussed the spectrum programming language features. In week 2, we discussed the ideas behind a language’s syntax and how source code is lexed and parsed. In week 3, we talked of how we name data with variables. In […]