Computer Graphics – CoSc3021

Chapter 01- Graphics Hardware

History of Computer Graphics

1941

Although the punched card was first used in 1801 to control textile looms, they were first used as
an input medium for “computing machines” in 1941. Special typewriter-like devices were used
to punch holes through sheets of think paper. These sheets could then be read (usually by
optically based machines) by computers. They were the first input device to load programs into
computers.

1950

 Ben Laposky created the first graphic images, an Oscilloscope, generated by an electronic
(analog) machine. The image was produced by manipulating electronic beams and
recording them onto high-speed film.

1955

 The light pen is introduced.

1960

Although known since the 1940's, the first serious work

on finite element methods of analysis is now published.
FEA allows us to test products virtually and
produce results that are as accurate as physical tests - at
far less cost and time. The results of such an analysis
was, back then, hundreds of pages of numbers that
humans had to interpret.

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1961

 Fil Salustri was born.

 The first video game, SpaceWar, ran using an oscilloscope as a display.
 Oscilloscopes are vector displays.
 Ivan Sutherland writes the first computer drawing program - SketchPad - which included
things like pop-up menus.

1963

 Doug Engelbart invents the computer mouse.

1965

 Jack Bresenham invents the “ideal” line-drawing algorithm.

 NASTRAN FEA software released.

1970

 ANSYS founded.

1972

 Nolan Kay Bushnell creates Pong, video arcade game.

 Raster displays begin to appear.
 Introduction of the CT scanner

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1975

 K. Vesprille's PhD dissertation “Computer-Aided Design Applications of the B-Spline

Approximation Form” develops the mathematical representation of arbitrary curves
suitable for computation.

1977

 The Apple II is the first graphics personal computer.

 Star Wars is released; its only computer effects were vector-based, and then filmed.
 CADAM, the first commercial 2D CAD package, is released.
 McDonnell Douglas buys United Computing, forming Unigraphics

1978

 First real standard for constructive solid geometry developed by H. Voelcker and others.
 Charles Lang at Cambridge University develops the first real boundary representation
modelling engine.

1981

 CATIA, one of the first 3D CAD packages, is developed, using constructive solid
geometry

1982

 The Commodore 64 personal computer used raster graphics so that regular televisions
could be display devices.
 TRON is the first movie to make extensive use of computer graphics.
 AutoCAD 1.0 is released - it uses wireframe representation only.

It was one of the first commercial personal computers to have a GUI and a mouse. It used a
Motorola 68000 CPU at a 5 MHz clock rate and had 512 KB or 1 MB RAM. This made it a
quantum leap in technology.

 But it was so innovative that it was wrong. It simulated hardware in software, so it's very
powerful CPU seemed slow to users. Also, there was no real software for it - it was in
some ways too powerful. And it was certainly too expensive.

1984

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  To generate one GFLOPS of processing power, The original Macintosh was in many
ways a “stripped down” Lisa. It had 20% of the base memory of the Lisa, but it ran faster
because it used conventional hardware configurations. In the design of the Macintosh,
Apple recognized that computational power was only one of many aspects of computer
use by humans and that if they wanted a good design, they would have to satisfy human
nature.
o The Macintosh set a new standard for computer design, and for design in general.
This went to the point of establishing Apple as the “anti-IBM” with a television
advertisement originally aired during Superbowl XVIII.

1985

 Pixar releases Luxo, Jr.

 Voxel technology is embedded in most medical imaging software.

1987

 VGA graphics standard introduced. Pro/Engineer launched as first pure UNIX CAD
software. Everyone laughed. 18 months later, all major CAD vendors were developing
CAD for UNIX.

1989

 SVGA graphics standard introduced.

 The Parasolid solid model engine standard released by Unigraphics; it is licensed to
nearly every other vendor.
 Tim Berners-Lee creates the very first website ever (this is even the actual original URL).
The version linked here is from 1993, as it seems older backups have gone missing.

1992

 All major CAD packages run on UNIX. SMEs lead the change from mainframes to high-
end UNIX workstations.

1993

 UIUC releases Mosaic, the first web browser for general usage. Mosaic's “codename”
was mozilla.
 Jurassic Park was the first big-budget CGI effects movie.
 First public call made from a cell phone.

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1994

 Dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, Autodesk finally releases a 3D
version of AutoCAD.
 Key developers of the Mosaic browser found Netscape.
 First flight of Boeing 777, tested entirely via ANSYS.

2001

 Final Fantasy movie is released.

o Rendering tears and water are now possible; the movement of hair still un-
renderable.
 EDS buys SDRC; Unigraphics and I-deas CAD packages merged to NX.

2003

 Doom graphics engine for games.

 ANSYS acquires CFX - computational fluids now begin to become popular.

2014

 It's getting so easy to do interesting things with cheap computers - like a typical laptop -
that developers are now starting to take advantage of mistakes in rendering as the
foundation of new games, like this one by Pillow Castle, called The Museum of
Simulation Technology.

2015

 We're now getting into a period where “big data” is being used to construct animations
that show us things we could not otherwise see/appreciate, like time-lapse changes in
large structures.

If Rembrandt were alive today, would he still paint with oil on canvas... or sit calmly at a desk,
hand on mouse, and draw dazzling graphics on a computer screen? Most of us would happily
admit to having less talent in both hands than a great painter like this had in a millimeter of his
pinkie, but computers can turn us into reasonably competent, everyday artists all the same.
Whether you're an architect or a web designer, a fashion student or a scientist, computer graphics
can make your work quicker, easier, and much more effective.

Computer graphics means drawing pictures on a computer screen. What's so good about that?
Sketch something on paper a man or a house and what you have is a piece of analog information:
the thing you draw is a likeness or analogy of something in the real world. Depending on the

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materials you use, changing what you draw can be easy or hard: you can erase pencil or charcoal
marks easily enough, and you can scrape off oil paints and redo them with no trouble; but
altering watercolors or permanent markers is an awful lot more tricky. That's the wonder of art,
of course it captures the fresh dash of creativity and that's exactly what we love about it. But
where everyday graphics is concerned, the immediacy of art is also a huge drawback. As every
sketching child knows too well, if you draw the first part of your picture too big, you'll struggle
to squeeze everything else on the page. and what if you change your mind about where to put
something or you want to swap red for orange or green for blue? Ever had one of those days
where you rip up sheet after sheet of spoiled paper and toss it in the trash?

That's why many artists, designers, and architects have fallen in love with computer graphics.
Draw a picture on a computer screen and what you have is a piece of digital information. It
probably looks similar to what you'd have drawn on paper the ghostly idea that was hovering in
your mind's eye to begin with but inside the computer your picture is stored as a series of
numbers. Change the numbers and you can change the picture, in the blink of an eye or even
quicker. It's easy to shift your picture around the screen, scale it up or down, rotate it, swap the
colors, and transform it in all kinds of other ways. Once it's finished, you can save it, incorporate
it into a text document, print it out, upload it to a web page, or email it to a client or work
colleague all because it's digital information.

Raster and vector graphics

All computer art is digital, but there are two very different ways of drawing digital images on a
computer screen, known as raster and vector graphics. Simple computer graphic programs like
Microsoft Paint and PaintShop Pro are based on raster graphics, while more sophisticated
programs such as CorelDRAW, AutoCAD, and Adobe Illustrator use vector graphics. So what
exactly is the difference?

Raster graphics

Stare hard at your computer screen and you'll notice the pictures and words are made up of tiny
colored dots or squares called pixels. Most of the simple computer graphic images we come
across are pixelated in this way, just like walls are built out of bricks. The first computer screens,
developed in the mid-20th century, worked much like televisions, which used to build up their
moving pictures by "scanning" beams of electrons (tiny charged particles inside atoms, also
called cathode rays) back and forth from top to bottom and left to right like a kind of instant
electronic paintbrush. This way of making a picture is called raster scanning and that's why
building up a picture on a computer screen out of pixels is called raster graphics.

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Bitmaps

The binary, the way that computers represent decimal numbers (1,2,3,4 and so on) using just the
two digits zero and one (so the decimal number 5678 becomes 1011000101110 in binary
computer speak). Suppose you're a computer and you want to remember a picture someone is
drawing on your screen. If it's in black and white, you could use a zero to store a white area of
the picture and a one to store a black area (or vice versa if you prefer). Copying down each pixel
in turn, you could transform a picture filling an entire screen of, say, 800 pixels across by 600
pixels down into a list of 480,000 (800 x 600) binary zeros and ones. This way of turning a
picture into a computer file made up of binary digits (which are called bits for short) is called a
bitmap, because there's a direct correspondence a one-to-one "mapping" between every pixel in
the picture and every bit in the file. In practice, most bitmaps are of colored pictures. If we use a
single bit to represent each pixel, we can only tell whether the pixel is on or off (white or black);
if we use (say) eight bits to represent each pixel, we could remember eight different colors, but
we'd need eight times more memory (storage space inside the computer) to store a picture the
same size. The more colors we want to represent, the more bits we need.

Raster graphics are simple to use and it's easy to see how programs that use them do their stuff.
If you draw a pixel picture on your computer screen and you click a button in your graphics
package to "mirror" the image (flip it from left to right or right to left), all the computer does is
reverse the order of the pixels by reversing the sequence of zeros and ones that represent them. If
you scale an image so it's twice the size, the computer copies each pixel twice over (so the
numbers 10110 become 1100111100) but the image becomes noticeably more grainy and
pixelated in the process. That's one of the main drawbacks of using raster graphics: they don't
scale up to different sizes very well. Another drawback is the amount of memory they require. A
really detailed photo might need 16 million colors, which involves storing 24 bits per pixel and
24 times as much memory as a basic black-and-white image.

Vector graphics

There's an alternative method of computer graphics that gets around the problems of raster
graphics. Instead of building up a picture out of pixels, you draw it a bit like a child would by
using simple straight and curved lines called vectors or basic shapes (circles, curves, triangles,
and so on) known as primitives. With raster graphics, you make a drawing of a house by building
it from hundreds, thousands, or millions of individual pixels; importantly, each pixel has no
connection to any other pixel except in your brain. With vector graphics, you might draw a
rectangle for the basic house, smaller rectangles for the windows and door, a cylinder for the
smokestack, and a polygon for the roof. Staring at the screen, a vector-graphic house still seems
to be drawn out of pixels, but now the pixels are precisely related to one another they're points
along the various lines or other shapes you've drawn. Drawing with straight lines and curves
instead of individual dots means you can produce an image more quickly and store it with less

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information: you could describe a vector-drawn house as "two red triangles and a red rectangle
(the roof) sitting on a brown rectangle (the main building)," but you couldn't summarize a
pixelated image so simply. It's also much easier to scale a vector-graphic image up and down by
applying mathematical formulas called algorithms that transform the vectors from which your
image is drawn. That's how computer programs can scale fonts to different sizes without making
them look all pixelated and grainy.

Most modern computer graphics packages let you draw an image using a mixture of raster or
vector graphics, as you wish, because sometimes one approach works better than another—and
sometimes you need to mix both types of graphics in a single image. With a graphics package
such as the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), you can draw curves on screen by
tracing out and then filling in "paths" (technically known as Bézier curves) before converting
them into pixels ("rasterizing" them) to incorporate them into something like a bitmap image.

3D graphics

Real life isn't like a computer game or a virtual reality simulation. The very best CGI (computer-
generated imagery) animations are easy to tell apart from ones made on film or video with real
actors. Why is that? When we look at objects in the world around us, they don't appear to be
drawn from either pixels or vectors. In the blink of an eye, our brains gather much more
information from the real-world than artists can include in even the most realistic computer-
graphic images. To make a computerized image look anything like as realistic as a photograph
(let alone a real-world scene), we need to include far more than simply millions of colored-in
pixels.

Really sophisticated computer graphics programs use a whole series of techniques to make hand-
drawn (and often completely imaginary) two-dimensional images look at least as realistic as
photographs. The simplest way of achieving this is to rely on the same tricks that artists have
always used such things as perspective (how objects recede into the distance toward a "vanishing
point" on the horizon) and hidden-surface elimination.

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The realistic 3D artwork for such things as CAD (computer-aided design) and virtual reality,
need much more sophisticated graphic techniques. Rather than drawing an object, you make a
3D computer model of it inside the computer and manipulate it on the screen in various ways.
First, you build up a basic three-dimensional outline of the object called a wire-frame (because
it's drawn from vectors that look like they could be little metal wires). Then the model is rigged,
a process in which different bits of the object are linked together a bit like the bones in a skeleton
so they move together in a realistic way. Finally, the object is rendered, which involves shading
the outside parts with different textures (surface patterns), colors, degrees of opacity or
transparency, and so on. Rendering is a hugely complex process that can take a powerful
computer hours, days, or even weeks to complete.

What is computer graphics used for?

Obvious uses of computer graphics include computer art, CGI films, architectural drawings, and
graphic design but there are many non-obvious uses as well and not all of them are "artistic."
Scientific visualization is a way of producing graphic output from computer models so it's easier
for people to understand. Computerized models of global warming produce vast tables of
numbers as their output, which only a PhD in climate science could figure out; but if you
produce a speeded-up animated visualization with the Earth getting bluer as it gets colder and
redder as it gets hotter anyone can understand what's going on. Medical imaging is another good
example of how graphics make computer data more meaningful. When doctors show you a brain
or body scan, you're looking at a computer graphic representation drawn using vast amounts of
data produced from thousands or perhaps even millions of measurements.

Application of Computer Graphics

Computer graphics are very useful. Today almost every computer can do some graphics, and
people have even come to expect to control their computer through icons and pictures rather than
just by typing.

Computer-generated imagery is used for movie making, video game and computer program
development, scientific modeling, and design for catalogs and other commercial art. Some
people even make computer graphics as art. We can classify applications of computer graphics
into four main areas:

 Display of information
 Design
 User interfaces
 Simulation

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 Computational Biology: Computational biology is an interdisciplinary field that applies
the techniques of computer science, applied mathematics and statistics to address
biological problems. The main focus lies on developing mathematical modeling and
computational simulation techniques.

 Computational Physics: Computational physics is the study and implementation of

numerical algorithm to solve problems in physics for which a quantitative theory already
exists. It is often regarded as a sub discipline of theoretical physics but some consider it
an intermediate branch between theoretical and experimental physics.
 Information of Graphics: Information graphics or information graphics are visual
representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where
complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps,
journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by
computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing
and communicating conceptual information.
 Scientific Visualization: Scientific visualization is a branch of science, concerned with
the visualization of three dimensional phenomena, such as architectural, meteorological,
medical, biological systems. Scientific visualization focuses on the use of computer
graphics to create visual images which aid in understanding of complex, often massive
numerical representation of scientific concepts or results.
 Graphic Design: The term graphic design can refer to a number of artistic and
professional disciplines which focus on visual communication and presentation. Various
methods are used to create and combine symbols, images and/or words to create a visual
representation of ideas and messages. Graphic design often refers to both the process
(designing) by which the communication is created and the products (designs) which are
generated.
 Computer-aided Design: Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer
technology for the design of objects, real or virtual. The design of geometric models for
object shapes, in particular, is often called computer-aided geometric design (CAGD).
CAD may be used to design curves and figures in two-dimensional ("2D") space; or
curves, surfaces, or solids in three-dimensional ("3D") objects. CAD is also widely used
to produce computer animation for special effects in movies, advertising, technical
manuals.
 Web Design: Web design is the skill of designing presentations of content usually
hypertext or hypermedia that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web,
by way of a Web browser. The process of designing Web pages, Web sites, Web
applications or multimedia for the Web may utilize multiple disciplines, such as
animation, authoring, communication design, corporate identity, graphic design, human-
computer interaction, information architecture, interaction design, marketing,
photography, search engine optimization and typography.

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  Digital Art: Digital art most commonly refers to art created on a computer in digital
form. On other hand, is a term applied to contemporary art that uses the methods of mass
production or digital media. The impact of digital technology has transformed traditional
activities such as painting, drawing and sculpture, while new forms, such as net art,
digital installation art, and virtual reality, have been recognized artistic practices.
 Video Games: A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user
interface to generate visual feedback on a raster display device. The electronic systems
used to play video games are known as platforms. This platform creates through graphics.
 Virtual Reality: Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with
a computer-simulated environment. The simulated environment can be similar to the real
world, for example, simulations for pilot or combat training, or it can differ significantly
from reality, as in VR games. It is currently very difficult to create a high-fidelity virtual
reality experience, due largely to technical limitations on processing power, image
resolution and communication bandwidth. Virtual Reality is often used to describe a wide
variety of applications, commonly associated with its immersive, highly visual, 3D
environments.
 Computer Simulation: A computer simulation, a computer model or a computational
model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an
abstract model of a particular system.
 Education: A computer simulation, a computer model or a computational model is a
computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model
of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical
modeling of many natural systems in physics (computational physics), chemistry and
biology, human systems in economics, psychology, and social science and in the process
of engineering new technology, to gain insight into the operation of those systems, or to
observe their behavior.
 Information Visualization: Information visualization is the study of the visual
representation of large-scale collections of non-numerical information, such as files and
lines of code in software systems, and the use of graphical techniques to help people
understand and analyze data.

The computer-generated images we see on television and in movies have advanced to the point
that they are almost indistinguishable from real-world images. Computer graphics become a
power field for the production of pictures. There are no areas in which graphical displays can't be
used to some advantages, so it is not surprising to find the use of computer graphics so
widespread.

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