Chapter 1

What Computer Graphics Is

Computer graphics is an interdisciplinary field where computer scientists,

mathematicians, physicists, engineers, artists and practitioners all gather with
the common goal of opening a “window” to the “world”. In the previous sen-
tence “window” is the monitor of a computer, the display of a tablet or a
smartphone or anything that can show images. The “world” is a digital model,
the result of a scientific simulation, or any entity for which we can conceive
a visual representation. The goal of this chapter is to provide the first basic
knowledge that the reader will need through the rest of the book during the
learning of how to develop his/her own interactive graphics application.

1.1 Application Domains and Areas of Computer

Graphics
Computer graphics (CG) deals with all the algorithms, methods and tech-
niques that are used to produce a computer-generated image, a synthetic im-
age, starting from a collection of data. This data can be the description of a
3D scene, like in a videogame; some physical measures coming from scientific
experiments, like in scientific visualization; or statistics collected through the
Web visualized in a compact way for summarization purposes, like in an in-
formation visualization application. The process of converting the input data
into an image is called rendering.
During the past twenty years, computer graphics has progressively spread
over almost all areas of life. This di↵usion has been mainly facilitated by the
increasing power and flexibility of the consumer graphics hardware, which pro-
vides the capability to a standard PC to render very complex 3D scenes, and
by the great e↵ort of the researchers and developers of the computer graphics
community to create efficient algorithms, which enable the developer to carry
out a wide range of visualization tasks. When you play a computer game,
many complex CG algorithms are at work to render your battle-field/space
ship/cars, when you go to the cinema you may see your latest movie partly
or entirely generated through a computer and a bunch of CG algorithms,

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2 Introduction to Computer Graphics: A Practical Learning Approach

when you are writing your business-planning presentation, graphics help you
to summarize trends and other information in a easy-to-understand way.

1.1.1 Application Domains

We mentioned just a few examples but CG applications span over a lot of
di↵erent ambits. Without expecting to be exhaustive, we give here a short list
of application fields of CG.
Entertainment Industry: creation of synthetic movies/cartoons, creation
of visual special e↵ects, creation of visually pleasant computer games.
Architecture: visualization of how the landscape of a city appears before
and after the construction of a building, design optimization of complex
architectural structures.
Mechanical Engineering: creation of virtual prototypes of mechanical
pieces before the actual realization, for example in the automotive in-
dustry.
Design: to enhance/aid the creativity of a designer who can play with sev-
eral shapes before producing his/her final idea, to test the feasibility of
fabricating objects.
Medicine: to train surgeons through virtual surgery simulations, to effi-
ciently visualize data coming from diagnostic instruments, and to plan
difficult procedures on a virtual model before the real intervention.
Natural Science: to visualize complex molecules in drugs development, to
enhance microscope images, to create a visualization of a theory about
a physical phenomenon, to give a visual representation of physical mea-
sures coming from an experiment.
Cultural Heritage: to create virtual reconstructions of ancient temples or
archeological sites; to show reconstruction hypotheses, for example how
ancient Rome appeared in its magnificence, for conservation and docu-
mentation purposes.

1.1.2 Areas of Computer Graphics

As mentioned in the introduction, computer graphics is a very general
concept encompassing a wide background knowledge. As such, it has naturally
evolved into a number of areas of expertise, the most relevant of which are:

Imaging: In recent years many image processing algorithms and techniques

have been adopted and extended by the CG community to produce
high quality images/videos. Matting, compositing, warping, filtering and
editing are common operations of this type. Some advanced tasks of this
 What Computer Graphics Is 3

type are: texture synthesis, which deals with the generation of visual
patterns of surface such as bricks of a wall, clouds in the sky, skin, facades
of buildings, etc.; intelligent cut-and-paste, an image editing operation
where the user selects a part of interest of an image and modifies it by
interactively moving it and integrates it into the surroundings of another
part of the same or other image; media retargeting, which consists of
changing an image so as to optimize its appearance in a specific media.
A classic example is how to crop and/or extend an image to show a movie
originally shot in a cinematographic 2.39 : 1 format (the usual notation
of the aspect ratio x : y means that the ratio between the width and the
height of the image is xy ) to the more TV-like 16 : 9 format.
3D Scanning: The process of converting real world objects into a digital
representation than can be used in a CG application. Many devices and
algorithms have been developed to acquire the geometry and the visual
appearance of a real object.
Geometric Modeling: Geometric modeling concerns the modeling of the
3D object used in the CG application. The 3D models can be generated
manually by an expert user with specific tools or semi-automatically
by specifying a sketch of the 3D object on some photos of it assisted
by a specific drawing application (this process is known as image-based
modeling).
Geometric Processing: Geometric processing deals with all the algorithms
used to manipulate the geometry of the 3D object. The 3D object can be
simplified, reducing the level of details of the geometry component; im-
proved, by removing noise from its surface or other topological anomalies;
re-shaped to account for certain characteristics; converted into di↵erent
types of representation, as we will see in Chapter 3; and so on. Many of
these techniques are related to the field of computational geometry.

Animation and Simulation: This area concerns all the techniques and al-
gorithms used to animate a static 3D model, ranging from the techniques
to help the artist to define the movement of a character in a movie to
the real-time physical simulation of living organs in a surgery simulator.
Much of the work in this area is rooted in the domain of mechanical en-
gineering, from where complex algorithms have been adapted to run on
low-end computers and in real time, often trading accuracy of physical
simulation for execution speed.
Computational Photography: This area includes all the techniques em-
ployed to improve the potential of digital photography and the quality
of digitally captured images. This CG topic spans optics, image pro-
cessing and computer vision. It is a growing field that has allowed us
to produce low-cost digital photographic devices capable of identifying
faces, refocusing images, automatically creating panoramas, capturing
4 Introduction to Computer Graphics: A Practical Learning Approach

images in high dynamic range, estimating the depth of the captured

scene, etc.

Rendering: We have just stated that rendering is the process of producing a

final image starting from some sort of data. Rendering can be categorized
in many ways depending on the property of the rendering algorithm. A
commonly used categorization is to subdivide rendering techniques into
photorealistic rendering, non-photorealistic rendering or information vi-
sualization. The aim of photorealistic rendering is to produce a synthetic
image as realistic as possible starting from a detailed description of the
3D scene in terms of geometry, both at macroscopic and microscopic
levels, and materials. Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) deals with all
the rendering techniques that relax the goal of realism. For example,
to visualize a car engine, the rendering should emphasize each of its
constituent elements; in this sense a realistic visualization is less useful
from a perceptual point of view. For this reason sometimes NPR is also
referred to as illustrative rendering. Information visualization concerns
the visualization of huge amounts of data and their relationships, usu-
ally it adopts schemes, graphs and charts. The visualization techniques
of this type are usually simple; the main goal is to express visually, in a
clear way, the data and their underlying relationships.
Another way to classify rendering algorithms is the amount of time they
require to produce the synthetic image. The term real-time rendering
refers to all the algorithms and techniques that can be used to generate
the images so fast as to guarantee user interaction with the graphics
application. In this ambit, computer game developers have pushed the
technologies to become capable of handling scenes of increasing complex-
ity and realism at interactive rates, which means generating the synthetic
image in about 40–50 milliseconds, which guarantees that the scene is
drawn 20–25 times per second. The number of times a scene is drawn on
the screen of a display surface is called framerate and it is measured in
frames-per-second (fps). Many modern computer games can achieve 100
fps or more. O✏ine rendering deals with all the algorithms and tech-
niques to generate photorealistic images of a synthetic scene without
the constraint of interactivity. For example, the images produced for an
animation movie are usually the result of o↵-line algorithms that run for
hours on a dedicated cluster of PCs (called render farm) and simulate
the interaction between the light and the matter by means of global il-
lumination (GI) techniques. Traditionally the term global-illumination
technique implied o↵-line rendering. Thanks especially to the improve-
ments in CG hardware, this is not entirely true anymore; there are many
modern techniques to introduce e↵ects of global illumination in real-time
rendering engines.