#WEBGL TESSELLATION TRIANGLE TWIST CODE#

It not only serves as test as to whether they have sufficient background for the course, they get to see what even a simple shader can do.Ģ.

#WEBGL TESSELLATION TRIANGLE TWIST CODE#

I give them some examples so that they need not write a lot of code to do this problem. However, if we tessellate the triangle by recursive subdivision, the vertices of the smaller triangles are different distances from the origin, which creates a display in which the filled triangles have a curved outline. Twist applied to its three vertices does not result in a very interesting display. The assignment starts with a single triangle centered at the origin. It is can best be done in a vertex shader. Tessellation and Twist: Twist is rotation, where the amount of rotation depends on the distance from the origin. Here are the five assignments, with some student postings folded in:ġ.

The fact that the applications were on public sites never became an issue. I referred the students who did not have public websites to codepen.io. Then they only had to submit the URL to let the graders run the code and see the source. Nevertheless, I did not want to teach the course unless I could require complete programs, each one satisfying a set of requirements.īecause WebGL runs in all recent browsers, students needed only have access to a public website where they could put their assignments. The two key ones are the time needed to do a complete program and the problem of grading thousands of assignments. While this philosophy is fairly common in university courses, it very uncommon in programming MOOCs. The two MOOCs, Eric’s and mine, are completely complementary and pretty much at the same level.Ī fundamental premise of my 30+ years of teaching computer graphics is that students should be able to write complete applications as early as possible. On the other hand, students in Computer Science and Computer Engineering focus on “what’s beneath the hood”: shaders, algorithms, architectures. Users of three.js can reap many of the advantages of WebGL without writing a single line of WebGL code. For those in the application world, such as the CAD community, who want to use computer graphics at a high level and not worry about writing shaders (or even knowing about shaders), three.js is a powerful tool built on top of WebGL. What we teach under the title of Computer Graphics can be very different depending on the audience. For those of you unfamiliar with WebGL or interested in what I do in my academic course, there’s lots of sample code here that was also available to the students in the MOOC. Given the explosion of interest in WebGL over the past year, I decided to do a MOOC using WebGL. We’ve also done both OpenGL and WebGL SIGGRAPH courses, which are now on Youtube at SIGRRAPH U. For the seventh edition we switched from OpenGL to WebGL, which has turned out to be an excellent decision. It has been the standard textbook for in computer graphics for students in computer science and engineering. I’m the coauthor, with Dave Shreiner, of the textbook Interactive Computer Graphics, which is now in its seventh edition.

Here are some of my observations, many of which echo some of Eric’s on previous blog posts, and many that relate to the present state of MOOCs.įirst, something about me and my course. The experience was interesting, at times exasperating, ultimately rewarding and a lot of work. Having taken Eric’s excellent three.js course with Udacity, I was interested in doing a very different course.

Recently I finished teaching a Coursera MOOC entitled Interactive Computer Graphics with WebGL.

Webgl tessellation triangle twist