In this assignment you will implement a simple rasterizer, including features like supersampling, hierarchical transforms, and texture mapping with antialiasing. At the end, you'll have a functional vector graphics renderer that can take in modified SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files, which are widely used on the internet.

Announcements

• Assignment 1 is due Wednesday February 10th at 11:59pm. Assignments which are turned in after 11:59pm are a full day late -- there are no late minutes or late hours.
• Note: You will write a webpage to present your results. We will add more details about requirements for this write-up, and provide an html template for you to use.

Getting set up

You can either download the zipped assignment straight to your computer or clone it from GitHub using the command

$ git clone https://github.com/CS184-sp16/asst1_rasterizester.git

Please consult this article on how to build and submit assignments for CS 184.

Using the GUI

You can run the executable with the command

./rasterizester ../svg/basic/test1.svg

A flower should show up on your screen. After finishing Part 4, you will be able to change the viewpoint by dragging your mouse to pan around or scrolling to zoom in and out. Here are all the keyboard shortcuts available (some depend on you implementing various parts of the assignment):

Key	Action
' '	return to original viewpoint
'-'	decrease sample rate
'='	increase sample rate
'Z'	toggle the pixel inspector
'P'	switch between texture filtering methods on pixels
'L'	switch between texture filtering methods on mipmap levels
'S'	save a png screenshot in the current directory
'1'-'9'	switch between svg files in the loaded directory
'ESC'	quit

The argument passed to rasterizester can either be a single file or a directory containing multiple svg files, as in

./rasterizester ../svg/basic/

If you load a directory with up to 9 files, you can switch between them using the number keys 1-9 on your keyboard.

Assignment structure

The assignment has 8 parts and 100 possible points. Some require only a few lines of code, while others are more substantial.

1. Rasterizing lines (5 pts)
2. Rasterizing single-color triangles (10 pts)
3. Antialiasing triangles (20 pts)
4. Transforms (10 pts)
5. Barycentric coordinates (5 pts)
6. "Pixel sampling" for texture mapping (15 pts)
7. "Level sampling" with mipmaps for texture mapping (25 pts)
8. Draw something interesting! (10++ pts)

For each part, the potentially relevant locations in the code are marked with a C++ comment that looks like

// Part 1: ...

There is a fair amount of code in the CGL library, which we will be using for future assignments. The relevant header files for this assignment are vector2D.h, matrix3x3.h, color.h, and renderer.h. In the discussion sections on Jan 27 and 28, we will give a tour of the starter code to help you get started with the assignment.

Here is a very brief sketch of what happens when you launch rasterizester: An SVGParser (in svgparser.*) reads in the input svg file(s), launches a OpenGL Viewer containing a DrawRend renderer, which enters an infinite loop and waits for input from the mouse and keyboard. DrawRend (drawrend.*) contains various callback functions hooked up to these events, but its main job happens inside the DrawRend::redraw() function. The high-level drawing work is done by the various SVGElement child classes (svg.*), which then pass their low-level point, line, and triangle rasterization data back to the three DrawRend rasterization functions.

What you will turn in

You will submit your entire project directory in a zip file. This should include a website directory containing a web-ready assignment writeup in a file index.html. Most parts of the assignment have Deliverables specified, which will be png and svg files along with various textual descriptions. You should accumulate these deliverables into sections in your webpage writeup as you go through the assignment. There are a few open-ended deliverables, and the quality of your explanations is just as important as your output images, especially when you are trying for extra credit! We want you to demonstrate a lucid understanding of what you have implemented.

Note: Do not squander all your hard work on this assignment by converting your png files into jpgs or any other format! Leave the screenshots as they are saved by the 'S' key in the GUI, otherwise you will introduce artifacts that will ruin your rasterization efforts. You can see these effects in the jpg images on this writeup page (which means, as a result, you should not use these for pixel-to-pixel comparisons!).

Act I: In which you implement the bare bones

Part 1 (warmup): Rasterizing lines (5 pts)

Relevant lecture: 2

Part 1 is intended to be a simple warmup problem: fill in the DrawRend::rasterize_line(...) function in drawrend.cpp. The given coordinates (x0,y0) and (x1,y1) define the screen-space endpoints of a line of color color. Screen space coordinates range from (0,0) at the top left to (width,height) at the bottom right of the viewing window. Assume that screen sample position are centered at half-integer coordinates in this space.

You may search the web for line-drawing algorithms and implement any you find (though write the code yourself). One option is to use Bresenham's algorithm. It is fine for you to rely on the existing implementation of DrawRend::rasterize_point(...) to write colors to the buffer. Make sure your algorithm only performs work proportional to the length of the line -- do not check every sample in the bounding box!

Deliverables:

• Save a png of svg/basic/test2.svg with the default viewing parameters and with the pixel inspector centered on an interesting part of the scene.

Part 2: Rasterizing single-color triangles (10 pts)

Relevant lecture: 2

Triangle rasterization is a core function in the graphics pipeline to convert input triangles into framebuffer pixel values. In Part 2, you will implement triangle rasterization using the methods discussed in lecture 2 to fill in the DrawRend::rasterize_triangle(...) function in drawrend.cpp.

Notes:

• For now, ignore the Triangle *tri input argument to the function. We will come back to this in part 5.
• You are encouraged but not required to implement the edge rules for samples lying exactly on an edge.
• Make sure the performance of your algorithm is no worse than one that checks each sample within the bounding box of the triangle.

When finished, you should be able to render many more test files, including those with rectangles and polygons, since we have provided the code to break these up into triangles for you. In particular, basic/test3.svg, basic/test4.svg, and basic/test5.svg should all render correctly.

Deliverables:

• Save a png of svg/basic/test4.svg with the default viewing parameters and with the pixel inspector centered on an interesting part of the scene.
• Extra Credit: Make your triangle rasterizer super fast (e.g., by factoring redundant arithmetic operations out of loops, minimizing memory access, and not checking every sample in the bounding box). Write about the optimizations you used. Use clock() to get timing comparisons between your naive and speedy implementations.

Part 3: Antialiasing triangles (20 pts)

Relevant lecture: 2

Use supersampling to get rid of the jaggies, to render nicely antialiased edges on your triangles. The sample_rate parameter in DrawRend (adjusted using the - and = keys) tells you how many samples to use per pixel.

You do not have to antialias points or lines.

You have some latitude to implement this part in whatever way you please. One piece of advice: to do this correctly, you will almost certainly need to keep track of width * height * sample_rate accumulated sample colors.

Take care to make sure your antialiasing interfaces correctly with alpha blending (think about how two full-opacity triangles each half-covering some portion of a pixel could differ from one half-opacity triangle covering the whole pixel...). One sign that you may have broken this is if cracks start to appear along the edges of previously watertight triangles, and good file to test this on is svg/basic/test4.svg.

Your triangle edges should be noticeably smoother when using > 1 sample per pixel! You can examine the differences closely using the pixel inspector.

Deliverables:

• Save a comparison png files of svg/basic/test4.svg with the default viewing parameters and sample rates 1, 4, and 16. Position the pixel inspector over an area that showcases the effect dramatically; for example, a very skinny triangle corner.
• Describe the new structs and functions you might have added to drawrend.* to implement antialiasing (there are multiple correct approaches).
• Extra Credit: Explore alternative antialiasing methods, such as jittered or low-discrepancy sampling. Create comparison images showing the differences between grid supersampling and your new pattern. Try making a scene that contains aliasing artifacts when rendered using grid supersampling but not when using your pattern.

Part 4: Transforms (10 pts)

Relevant lecture: 3

Implement the three transforms in the transforms.cpp file according to the SVG spec. The matrices are 3x3 because they operate in homogeneous coordinates -- you can see how they will be used on instances of Vector2D by looking at the way the * operator is overloaded in the same file.

Additionally, implement DrawRend::move_view(...) in drawrend.cpp. This will allow you to pan and scroll using your cursor. Make sure you understand the matrix stack that transitions first from SVG to normalized device coordinates, then from NDC to screen space coordinates.

Deliverables:

• Create a new svg file using geometric primitives and a hierarchical transform stack (at least two matrices deep) involving your new rotation, translation, and scaling matrices. Here is one example of how the SVG Group element is used to make a transform stack. Create four copies of your svg file where you modify a transform to illustrate your grouping hierarchy. Save your svg files in the svg/my_examples/ directory and add png screenshots of your rendered drawing to the writeup.
• Extra Credit: Add an extra feature to the GUI. For example, you could make two unused keys to rotate the viewport. Save an example image to demonstrate your feature, and write about how you modified the SVG to NDC and NDC to screen-space matrix stack to implement it.

Act II: In which you become a sampling guru

Part 5 (warmup): Barycentric coordinates (5 pts)

Relevant lecture: 4

Familiarize yourself with the ColorTri struct in svg.h. Modify your implementation of DrawRend::rasterize_triangle(...) so that if a non-NULL Triangle *tri pointer is passed in, it computes barycentric coordinates of each sample hit and passes them to tri->color(...) to request the appropriate color.

Implement the ColorTri::color(...) function in svg.cpp so that it returns this color. This function is very simple: it does not need to make use of any arguments besides Vector2D xy (the remaining arguments are for the texture mapped triangles). Note that this color() function plays the role of a very primitive shader.

Deliverables:

• Save a png of svg/basic/test7.svg with the default viewing parameters and sample rate 1.

Part 6: "Pixel sampling" for texture mapping (15 pts)

Relevant lecture: 4

Familiarize yourself with the TexTri struct in svg.h. This is the primitive that implements texture mapping. For each vertex, you are given corresponding uv coordinates that index into the Texture pointed to by *tex.

To implement texture mapping, DrawRend::rasterize_triangle should fill in the psm and lsm members of a SampleData struct and pass it to tri->color(...). Then TexTri::color(...) should fill in the correct uv coordinates in the SampleData struct, and pass it on to tex->sample(...). Then Texture::sample(...) should examine the SampleData to determine the correct sampling scheme.

The GUI toggles DrawRend's PixelSampleMethod variable psm using the 'P' key. When psm == P_NEAREST, you should use nearest-pixel sampling, and when psm == P_LINEAR, you should use bilinear sampling.

You can pass in dummy Vector2D(0,0) values for the dx and dy arguments to tri->color

For this part, just pass 0 for the level parameter of the sample_nearest and sample_bilinear functions.

For convenience, here is a list of functions you will need to modify:

1. DrawRend::rasterize_triangle
2. TexTri::color
3. Texture::sample
4. Texture::sample_nearest
5. Texture::sample_bilinear

Deliverables:

• Test the svg files in the svg/texmap/ directory. Use the pixel inspector to find a good example of where bilinear sampling clearly defeats nearest sampling. Hint: you want the texture to be magnified in the rendered image. Save four screenshots to show comparisons between nearest and bilinear at 1 sample per pixel and at 16 samples per pixel. Comment on the relative differences.

Part 7: "Level sampling" with mipmaps for texture mapping (25 pts)

Relevant lecture: 4

Finally, you will add support for sampling different MipMap levels. The GUI toggles DrawRend's LevelSampleMethod variable lsm using the 'L' key.

• When lsm == L_ZERO, you should sample from the zero-th MipMap, as in Part 6.
• When lsm == L_NEAREST, you should compute the nearest appropriate MipMap level using the one-pixel difference vectors du and dv and pass that level as a parameter to the nearest or bilinear sample function.
• When lsm == L_LINEAR, you should find the appropriate MipMap level and do full trilinear sampling by getting two bilinear samples from adjacent levels and computing a weighted sum.

Implement Texture::get_level as a helper function. This is the trickiest math in the whole assignment -- make sure to read the relevant slides in Lecture 4 carefully.

For convenience, here is a list of functions you will need to modify:

1. DrawRend::rasterize_triangle
2. TexTri::color
3. Texture::sample
4. Texture::get_level

Deliverables:

• There are large number of sampling schemes available to you now: you can adjust pixel sampling, level sampling, and samples per pixel all independent of one another! Pull some png images from the internet and create your own svg files to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of various techniques at different zoom levels. You can take existing files in svg/texmap/ and replace the texture filename to try out new images. A good starting place for this is svg/texmap/test7.png. Show at least one example (using a png file you find yourself) comparing all four combinations of one of L_ZERO and L_NEAREST with one of P_NEAREST and P_BILINEAR at a zoomed out viewpoint.
• Extra Credit: Implement anisotropic filtering or summed area tables. Show comparisons of your method to nearest, bilinear, and trilinear sampling. Use clock() to measure the relative performance of the methods.

Part 8: Draw something interesting! (10++ pts)

Use your newfound powers to render something fun and attractive. You can look up the svg specifications online for matrix transforms and for Point, Line, Polyline, Rect, Polygon, and Group classes. The ColorTri and TexTri are our own inventions, so you can intuit their parameters by looking at the svgparser.cpp file. Some ideas:

• Try to draw something "by hand" on graph paper, and manually transfer it to coordinates in the svg file.
• Write a program to procedurally generate some geometric patterns. For example, we wrote some simple programs to generate the texture mapped svg files in the svg/texmap/ directory as well as the color wheel in svg/basic/test7.svg.
• Write a program that thresholds an input photo and generates a triangle mesh from it.

We will consider aesthetics, so it's worthwhile to consider factors like composition, color, etc.

Deliverables:

• Give us your best svg file and a png screenshot of it! Also include a description of what you were trying to achieve, and how you created your svg file.
• Extra Credit: Flex your right or left brain -- either show us your artistic side, or generate awesome procedural patterns with code. This could involve a lot of programming either inside or outside of the codebase! If you write a script to generate procedural svg files, include it in your submission and briefly explain how it works.

Tips

• Start early!
• Start assembling your webpage early to make sure you have a handle on how to edit the html code to insert images and format sections.
• The earlier you finish the basic requirements of the assignment, the more time you'll have to choose your favorite parts and implement some extra credit extensions!