CANISIUS lecture -- Jorg Peters
Mathematics of Computer Graphics


What gives Pixar's characters their looks? How does one simulate a flock of birds? The course participants will discover the power and beauty of affine invariant representations of geometry based on barycentric coordinates, the use of control structures and curved geometry via refinement.
To make the experience concrete course participants will build a 2D drawing environment using a mathematical toolkit and see programs for graphical interaction with geometry using OpenGL, the lingua franca of graphic programming.

An important aspect is for the participants to understand how the practical and theoretical tools generalize to representing geometry and functions in higher dimensions. Creating and modifying shapes to meet a given functionality (shape, smoothness, interpolation) is central to web-age activities stretching from animation to scientific computing.

  Topic Homework
Introduction
Four views of Bezier curves
Properties of the Bezier form in one variable
Draw the example curves  
Why do the Bezier basis functions sum to 1?
Properties of Bezier forms
Bezier patches
Multivariate Bezier forms
Draw example surfaces  
Do some of the exercises in the Bezier handout
some test problems
Matlab session
implementation (in Matlab)
Hand in problems 3 and 5 of "some test problems" on Friday for your grade
more test problems
uniform splines
uniform spline curves implemented
Draw B-spline curves
Box splines
B-splines
Subdivision Curves and Surfaces
3pm Public Lecture
Draw the example Box spline
Draw subdivision curves