Classroom:	Room 1201 River Building
Class Times:	Mon 6pm (3 hours)
Course Website:	http://www.scs.carleton.ca/~lalonde/comp4501

A practical course aiming to understand the details of advanced facilities supported by state of the art game engines. Such facilities include notions such as relief mapping, ambient occlusion, shadows, deferred renderers, physics engines, occlusion culling, water effects, instancing, and geometry shaders. The topics are suggestions that we will use to drive the course and may include fewer or more topics depending on circumstances.

Introduction: A quick review of some of the preliminaries that you should have had from other courses including a simple lighting model that we will make use of in the more advanced topics below and an understanding of filters that are used by shaders for sampling information from textures. We will assume you already have experience with shaders and will make use of and change shaders associated with DirectX9-10-11 along with OpenGL. Relief Mapping What it is. The notion of tangents space and how to map to and from this space along with the development of shaders that perform normal mapping, parallax mapping, relief mapping, and cone mapping. Ambient Occlusion: What it is. Techniques for performing ambient occlusion including the development of shaders culminating in an advanced multi-resolution screen space ambient occlusion shader. Shadows The distinction between shadow volumes (requiring a stencil buffer) and shadow maps (not). The evolution of a series of shaders for shadow mapping from percentage closer filtering, variance shadow maps, through to an advance hierarchical min-max shadow map for soft shadows. Physics A discussion of physics engines such as the Bullet or Nvidia’s PhysX, not so much for the facilities they provide, but more for the notion of how to add it to your own game engine. Deferred Rendering The distinction between forward renders and deferred renderers, including the notion of multiple render targets, pre-lighting and post-lighting deferred renderers. Other Topics What occlusion culling is. Hardware occlusion culling along with some of the current problems. What instancing is. It’s advantages and some of the current problems. Water shaders along with reflection and refraction. Geometry shaders.

Main Book: None. However, it may prove useful to have access to materials on OpenGL and DirectX9 through directX11 including their respective shader languages. Reference Material: Game Programming Gems, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII, Charles River Media, Inc. GPU Gems, II, and III, Addison Wesley. GPU Pro, II, and III, A.K Peters. Real-time Shadows, CRC Press Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics (Third edition is the latest), Eric Lengyel, Charles River Media, Inc.

Collaborating on assignments is strictly disallowed. You must complete the work by yourself. If you need help, please see a TA or your instructor. Posting assignment solutions on discussion boards before the due date and time is also prohibited.

The Undergraduate Advisor for the School of Computer Science is available in Room 5302C HP, by telephone at 520-2600, ext. 4364 or by email at undergraduate_advisor@scs.carleton.ca. The undergraduate advisor can assist with information about prerequisites and preclusions, course substitutions/equivalencies, understanding your academic audit and the remaining requirements for graduation. The undergraduate advisor will also refer students to appropriate resources such as the Science Student Success Centre, Learning Support Services and the Writing Tutorial Services.