SIGGRAPH 1984 Project Topics

Projects are possible on any of the SIGGRAPH 1984 papers listed below. Each paper is available from the compsci715 afs space, in the directory "SIGGRAPH 1984", with the filenames as listed. See also the course's resources page for ideas about where to look for more information about these papers.

I expect you to look up and at least skim the papers before Tuesday. Pick several that you'd like to work on -- we will have only one group per topic so you may not get your first choice.

Plants, fractals, and formal languages

• by Alvy Ray Smith
• Filename: p001-smith.pdf
• A classic paper in natural modelling. Concepts are relatively simple, but the paper doesn't explain them well. Would involve explorations of more modern treatments of the subject.

The A-buffer, an antialiased hidden surface method

• by Loren Carpenter
• Filename: p103-carpenter.pdf
• Gets at core issues in polygon rendering. Idea is straightforward but understanding the rendering context could be challending, as could be the implementation.

Beam tracing polygonal objects

• by Paul S. Heckbert, Pat Hanrahan
• Filename: p119-heckbert.pdf
• Core ray tracing topic. Cool ideas but limited expandability. Programming is tricky; would appeal to hackers. Low maths content.

Ray tracing with cones

• by John Amanatides
• Filename: p129-amanatides.pdf
• Core ray tracing topic. Paper omits some details to be filled in by the reader. Implementation is relatively straighforward so I'd expect good experimentation and analysis.

Distributed ray tracing

• by Robert L. Cook, Thomas Porter, Loren Carpenter
• Filename: p137-cook.pdf
• An important advance on basic ray tracing, and a simple concept the generates interesting effects. Implementation is relatively straighforward so I'd expect good experimentation and analysis.

Summed-area tables for texture mapping

• by Franklin C. Crow
• Filename: p207-crow.pdf
• A simple and elegant idea. Implementation would involve doing low-level texture mapping calculation "by hand". Would expect a comparison to the MIP mapping technique.

Modeling the interaction of light between diffuse surfaces

• by Cindy M. Goral, Kenneth E. Torrance, Donald P. Greenberg, Bennett Battaile
• Filename: p213-goral.pdf
• A challenging paper, but one that I'd like to see a group try and tackle. You should have a good math background. While the paper can be hard to follow there are more recent references that explain it more clearly.

Global and local deformations of solid primitives

• by Alan H. Barr
• Filename: p021-barr.pdf
• Difficult. An important paper, but a challenging one. Suitable only for groups with a strong maths background.

Ray tracing volume densities

• by James T. Kajiya, Brian P Von Herzen
• Filename: p165-kajiya.pdf
• Difficult. An important paper, but extremely challenging. Suitable only for groups with a strong maths/physics background. Would be acceptable to study a subset of the paper.