UCSD Spring 2020

CSE 168 Computer Graphics II: Rendering

Instructor: Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi, Email: ravir@cs.ucsd.edu
Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:50, Please see Piazza for Zoom URL.
TA: Andrew Bauer a1bauer@eng.ucsd.edu    Tutor: Guangyan Cai g5cai@ucsd.edu

Overview

Computer Graphics II: Rendering is an advanced computer graphics course, intended both for undergraduates with a strong interest in computer graphics, as well as Masters and PhD students specializing in the area, and in related fields. We have worked with the graduate program to have it count for full credit for MS/PhD students. Specifically, CSE 168 is intended to be a regularly taught follow-on course to CSE 167 that all students who have interest in the area and have done well in 167 are encouraged to take, as part of a full-year sequence in computer graphics. If you took CSE 167 from me, it follows on directly from the end of 167. The course also fully accomodates those who took 167 with other professors or the equivalent at other universities, and introduces basic material. The goals are similar to earlier CSE 168 versions at UCSD, but I am teaching it for the first time, and introducing many new innovations and modern treatments.

This is a course on modern rendering or simulating the propagation of paths of light to create realistic images in 3D scenes. In the past decade, the industry has undergone the "path tracing revolution" wherein the methods taught in this class are widely used in practice. As such, this course is up to date on material that is actively used in industry, and teaches essential topics in modern computer graphics. We will make use of state of the art techniques and algorithms including suggestions for real-time ray and path tracing in OptiX, and build a modern path tracer with multiple importance sampling. This course also aims at a unified treatment of different forms of rendering and will also discuss real-time, precomputed and image-based rendering. Above are some example images from the types of topics we will be covering; the first two are the canonical ray and path tracing images from the original papers in the 1980s, while the last two show some of the possibilities for today's renderers (the last is rendered in CSE 168 from 2007).

Please head to the Info page for more detailed information.

Logistics

Lectures: Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30-10:50am. Discussion Wed 7pm, Please see Piazza for zoom links for all lectures and discussions.

Instructor Office Hours: Tuesday / Thursday, 11am-12pm at my personal meeting room (not the URL for class lectures). The instructor can also be reached at any time by e-mail at ravir@cs.ucsd.edu to set up a time to meet if this is not convenient.

TA Office Hours: Monday / Tuesday 3-4pm (see Piazza for zoom URL)

Tutor Office Hours: Thursday 6-8pm (see Piazza for zoom URL)

We have also created a Piazza newsgroup for the course. Please sign up as soon as possible CSE 168 Spring 2020. Please e-mail the TA/tutor to set up a different time individually if none of these work. The group e-mail for the TAs/tutors is cse-168ta@eng.ucsd.edu.