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Graphics courses offered

Current offerings are listed first.

Technical Animation

This course introduces techniques for computer animation such as keyframing, procedural methods, motion capture, and simulation. We will focus primarily on character animation, but will also discuss animation of cloth and natural phenomena. Recent research results will be considered as well as basic techniques. The course also includes a brief overview of story-boarding, scene composition, and lighting.

Offerings

Computer Game Programming

This course will cover tools and techniques for programming interactive games and virtual reality simulations. The course will focus primarily on programming aspects, including event loops and execution threads, rendering and animation in 3D, terrain/background representation, polygonal models, texturing, collision detection and physically-based modeling, game AI, and multi-user games and networking. Although this course has a heavy programming focus, other topics briefly covered will include the history of computer/video game technology, game genres and design principles, and the social impact of games.

Offerings

Animation Art and Technology

Students in this course will learn to use computer-based tools such as Maya to create artistic animation. The final project will begin as a storyboard, morph into an animatic and gradually become a complete animation with fully rendered frames and audio.

Offerings

Physically Based Character Animation

This course will explore topics in physically based character animation, where the goal is to obtain a character performance that appears both natural and physically plausible. We will focus on optimization approaches to generating realistic motion for humanlike characters and cover research results in computer graphics and biomechanics. The course should be appropriate for graduate students with some computer graphics and / or robotics experience and for advanced undergraduates.

Offerings

Vision Sensors

This course covers the fundamentals of vision cameras and other sensors - how they function, how they are built, and how to use them effectively. The course presents a journey through the fascinating five hundered year history of "camera-making" from the early 1500's "camera obscura" through the advent of film and lenses, to today's mirror-based and solid state devices (CCD, CMOS). The course includes a significant hands-on component where students learn how to use the sensors and understand, model and deal with the uncertainty (noise) in their measurements. While the first half of the course deals with conventional "single viewpoint" or "perspective" cameras, the second half of the course covers much more recent "multi-viewpoint" or "multi-perspective" cameras that includes a host of lenses and mirrors.

Offerings

Learning-based methods in Computer Vision

The goal of this graduate seminar course is to gain a deeper understanding of the computer vision problem in order to better reason about ways data and learning could be used to tackle it. The central focus will be on representation of visual data, rather than on fancy learning techniques. We will be looking at all stages of visual processing, from low-level (color, texture, local patches) all the way to high-level (object recognition, general image understanding). We will pay particular attention to mid-level vision (grouping, segmentation, figure/ground, scene layout, image parsing) -- a crucial glue tying vision together that has been largely neglected. The course will have an emphasis on using large amounts of real data (images, video, textual annotations, other meta-data). We will also discuss the difficult issue of what is the right choice of training data and how can it be acquired.

Offerings

Computational Photography

Computational Photography is an emerging new field created by the convergence of computer graphics, computer vision and photography. Its role is to overcome the limitations of the traditional camera by using computational techniques to produce a richer, more vivid, perhaps more perceptually meaningful representation of our visual world. The aim of this advanced undergraduate course is to study ways in which samples from the real world (images and video) can be used to generate compelling computer graphics imagery. We will learn how to acquire, represent, and render scenes from digitized photographs. Several popular image-based algorithms will be presented, with an emphasis on using these techniques to build practical systems. This hands-on emphasis will be reflected in the programming assignments, in which students will have the opportunity to acquire their own images of indoor and outdoor scenes and develop the image analysis and synthesis tools needed to render and view the scenes on the computer.

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The Animation of Natural Phenomena

This class covers physical simulation in computer graphics. The goal is to teach a broad swath of techniques -- from particle systems to human animation -- while learning some math, working on fun projects, and practicing quick problem solving and public presentation skills.

Offerings

Physics-based methods in Computer Vision

Everyday we observe an extraordinary array of light and color phenomena around us, ranging from the dazzling effects of the atmosphere, the complex appearances of surfaces and materials and underwater scenarios. For a long time, artists, scientists and photographers have been fascinated by these effects, and have focused their attention on capturing and understanding these phenomena. In this course, we take a computational approach to modeling and analyzing these phenomena, which we collectively call as "visual appearance". The first half of the course focuses on the physical fundamentals of visual appearance, while the second half of the course focuses on algorithms and applications in a variety of fields such as computer vision, graphics and remote sensing and technologies such as underwater and aerial imaging. This course is an initial attempt to unify concepts usually learnt in physical sciences and their application in imaging sciences. The course will also include a photography competition in addition to analytical and practical assignments.

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Generating Natural Human Motion

This course is an in-depth study of recently developed techniques for creating natural human motion for robotics and computer animation. We will explore both the mathematical techniques behind these systems and techniques for evaluating them. The topics to be covered include: control, motion graphs, statistical motion synthesis, motion blending, and optimization.

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Physical Simulation for Computer Animation

Physically based simulation techniques have revolutionized special effects in film and video games, creating extremely realistic effects while allowing unprecedented artistic control and avoiding dangerous situations. This course will explore physically based simulation methods for computer animation of a wide variety of phenomena and materials including rigid and deformable solids, cloth, liquids, and explosions. Students will be introduced to numerical methods, physical models, data structures, and theoretical results which form the building blocks of these methods. To gain hands-on experience, students will implement basic simulators for several phenomena.

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Advanced Computer Graphics

This course will be a hands-on class on advanced computer graphics. It will cover major aspects of digital image generation: geometric modeling, computer animation, and rendering. The goal of the course is to provide a strong foundation for computer graphics principles, and provide a hands-on introduction to recent advanced topics, e.g., subdivision surfaces, real-time global illumination, and physically based animation. The course should be appropriate for graduate students in all areas and for advanced undergraduates.

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Advanced Perception

16-721 is a graduate seminar devoted to recent research on computer vision. We will be reading an eclectic mix of vision papers on topics such as perception, object and scene recognition, segmentation, tracking, as well as "best papers of all time".

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Physically Based Modeling and Interactive Simulation

This course introduces students to physically based modeling for computer graphics and related fields, and summarizes current research issues. Efficient numerical methods for simulating a host of visually interesting physical phenomena will be covered, and discussed in the context of both interactive and offline simulation. The course should be appropriate for graduate students in all areas and for advanced undergraduates.

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Data-driven Character Animation

This course is an in-depth study of recently developed techniques for using data to produce character animations. We will explore systems that have been developed for both interactive and off-line animations using motion capture data, video data, and body scans. The topics to be covered include: motion editing, retargeting, motion graphs, statistical motion synthesis, interfaces, skinning and modeling of deformable shapes for human animation.

Offerings