Computer graphics studies the manipulation of visual and geometric information using computational techniques. It focuses on the mathematical and computational foundations of image generation and processing rather than purely aesthetic issues. Computer graphics is often differentiated from the field of visualization, although the two fields have many similarities. Connected studies include:
There are several international conferences and journals where the most significant results in computer graphics are published. Among them are the SIGGRAPH and Eurographics conferences and the Association for Computing MachineryTransactions on Graphics journal. The joint Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH symposium series features the major venues for the more specialized sub-fields: Symposium on Geometry Processing, Symposium on Rendering, Symposium on Computer Animation, and High Performance Graphics. As in the rest of computer science, conference publications in computer graphics are generally more significant than journal publications.
Subfields
A broad classification of major subfields in computer graphics might be:
Geometry: ways to represent and process surfaces
Animation: ways to represent and manipulate motion
The subfield of geometry studies the representation of three-dimensional objects in a discrete digital setting. Because the appearance of an object depends largely on its exterior, boundary representations are most commonly used. Two dimensional surfaces are a good representation for most objects, though they may be non-manifold. Since surfaces are not finite, discrete digital approximations are used. Polygonal meshes are by far the most common representation, although point-based representations have become more popular recently. These representations are Lagrangian, meaning the spatial locations of the samples are independent. Recently, Euleriansurface descriptions such as level sets have been developed into a useful representation for deforming surfaces which undergo many topological changes. ; Geometry Subfields
Out-of-core mesh processing – another recent field which focuses on mesh datasets that do not fit in main memory.
Animation
The subfield of animation studies descriptions for surfaces that move or deform over time. Historically, most work in this field has focused on parametric and data-driven models, but recently physical simulation has become more popular as computers have become more powerful computationally. ; Subfields
Rendering generates images from a model. Rendering may simulate light transport to create realistic images or it may create images that have a particular artistic style in non-photorealistic rendering. The two basic operations in realistic rendering are transport and scattering. See Rendering for more information. ; Transport Transport describes how illumination in a scene gets from one place to another. Visibility is a major component of light transport. ; Scattering Models of scattering and shading are used to describe the appearance of a surface. In graphics these problems are often studied within the context of rendering since they can substantially affect the design of rendering algorithms. Shading can be broken down into two orthogonal issues, which are often studied independently:
scattering – how light interacts with the surface at a given point
The former problem refers to scattering, i.e., the relationship between incoming and outgoing illumination at a given point. Descriptions of scattering are usually given in terms of a bidirectional scattering distribution function or BSDF. The latter issue addresses how different types of scattering are distributed across the surface. Descriptions of this kind are typically expressed with a program called a shader. ;Other subfields
