Tietoliikenneohjelmistojen ja multimedian laboratorio

TML / Opinnot

The survey paper and supplementary material

This page describes the paper that is to be written by the participants of the real-time shading seminar.

Topic, length and credits

The participants must write a paper with the header "A Survey of Real- Time Shading". The paper should be 10-12 pages for undergraduates and 15-16 pages for graduate students. The limits are strict. 10-12 page papers are worth 2 credits (ov), and 15-16 page papers earn 3 credits.

Returning the paper

The paper, in Adobe PDF format, must be returned by e-mail to Jaakko Lehtinen so that it arrives before Friday 30.7.2004 23:59.

Purpose and contents

The students should take thorough notes on the lectures with the purpose of forming a clear idea of what real-time shading is about, and what subproblems the field encompasses. It is recommended that you draw a diagram describing the field and include it in the introduction section of your paper.

The purpose of the survey paper is to present the basic ideas and applications of real-time shading, and to present a cross-section of the methods used for solving the associated problems. Analysis of the differences, benefits and downsides of the algorithms is required.

Where applicable, the discussion of a certain subfield should contain a more thorough description of only one algorithm; other methods that fall into the same category should then be compared to it on a more general level. Examples of such subfields are shadow algorithms and measured BRDF approximation.

The idea is not to present all the technical details of all the methods, but instead to expose the ideas in an intuitive fashion. Warning: For being able to offer an exact and intuitive account for an algorithm does require you to understand it thoroughly!

Language and style

Undergraduate students may write the survey either in Finnish or in English, while English is required for graduate students. Good language, style and structure of the paper play an important role, and they will affect grading strongly. Particularly, using English terms amidst Finnish text is considered bad style.

The paper should be written in good scientific style, with proper citings. If you are not familiar with the style, you should download and read some articles from the proceedings of SIGGRAPH, ACM Transactions on Graphics or IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, or the like. Links to electronic full-text databased for these can be found below. Note that they only work from within the hut.fi-domain.

References

The references made in the paper should follow the (Name, year) convention. (If you use the LaTex template provided on the course website, BibTex will take care of this for you.)

Examples:

Single author:
"..the previous method (Hanrahan, 1991) works by.."

Two authors:
"..the previous method (Hanrahan & Saltzman, 1991) works by.."

Three or more authors:
"..the previous method (Hanrahan et al., 1991) works by.."

It is also possible to use the authors' names inside the text, and use only the year as the citing; examples:

"..the method of Hanrahan (1991) works by.."

Paper organization

The paper should be organized as follows. The item "Discussion of the subfields" is not meant to be used as a header; it should be divided into as many sections as necessary and given appropriate headers.

Abstract
A short (max. 200 words) description of the contents.

Introduction
An overview of the topic of the paper; what the problems are, why they are important; the scope of the papers; the organization of the rest of the paper.

An overview of real-time shading
Your own taxonomy of the subfields of real-time shading.

Discussion of the subfields

Conclusions
A wrap-up of what has been presented; what hasn't been covered. What problems remain?

Formatting

The paper will be returned as a PDF file. All formatting should adhere to the standard set by the templates below, given for Latex and MS Word. Notice that you will need to change the dates and names of the seminar.
sempaper2000.doc Instructions (Word)
sempaper2000.pdf Instructions (PDF)

For those writing their paper with LaTex we offer an old paper as an example. (You should still read the instructions from above.) You will need all the files from below to compile the example.
sempaper2000.tex An old paper in LaTex
ti_article.cls Formatting template for the paper
authordate1-4_2.sty Reference style
authordate1_ti.bst BibTex style
sempaper2000.bib An example BibTex database


Links

ACM and IEEE journals

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH are published from 2003 on as a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics (issues 21:3 and 22:3).

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

GDC slides

Advanced real-time reflectance (GDC2004)
High dynamic range lighting (GDC2004)

Game Developer Magazine (requires registration)

Implementing lighting models with HLSL
The mechanics of robust stencil shadows
Real-time glow

Other

High-quality shading and lighting for hardware-accelerated rendering, PhD thesis, Wolfgang Heidrich.
The website of the book Real-time Rendering by Möller and Haines; contains a lot of links.

The contents of this page are managed by Jaakko Lehtinen. The page has been last updated 3.6.2004.
URL: http://www.tml.hut.fi/Opinnot/T-111.500/2004_Summer/index.html