Topics

This course gives insights into the field of realtime rendering as used in virtual reality applications or computer games. Topics include:

• Architecture of graphics hardware
• Performance optimization for graphics hardware
• Advanced lighting and shading (including physically based shading, normal mapping, ambient occlusion)
• Shading languages
• Graphics programming
• Shadows (hard and soft, rasterization and ray-tracing-based)
• Culling and visibility
• Levels of detail und terrain rendering
• Image-based rendering and 3D Gaussian splatting
• Perceptual aspects of rendering
• Screenspace effects
• Temporal coherence
• Real-time global illumination

Lectures and Revision Course

Lectures and the revision course will be given in Seminarraum FAV 05 (HA0503).
Lectures will take 90 minutes and are typically scheduled for Wednesdays, 13:00-15:00 (c.t.). 

Please mind the following dates:

Lab Course

Please note the following deadlines for the lab course. All submissions are to be done via TUWEL

Modus

The course consists of 10-15 lectures and a lab part in which a small rendering demo with effects from the lecture must be implemented in groups of two.

Grading

The final grade is a weighted average of the exercise (60%) and the oral exam (40%). Both parts must be passed to pass the whole course. You must pass the exercise part in order to be admitted to the exam.

Oral Exams

Dates for the oral exams will be offered in February 2027. Oral exams will also serve as submission talks for the lab component. The grades for both the lab part and the exam are given after the oral exam.

Lab Course

The goal of the lab course is to write a small rendering demo. The implementation is done in groups of two and must show at least two effects covered in the lecture. During the semester, you have to attend an open lab to discuss your progress at least twice. The lab part ends with the final presentations in the last lecture. There's no need to prepare slides, just run your demo and talk about the effects you've implemented and how you did it. The demo should be presented within 2-3 minutes.

To see what we expect from a demo, have a look at the Hall of Fame where all submissions of the previous years are shown.

The implemented effects can exceed/extend what is shown in the lectures. But make sure to check for prior work, there is already a large variety of different shaders available. You should choose a topic where at least parts of the effect have to be implemented by yourself. Please make sure to always state all references that were used. The effects must be proposed in the Submission 1 and you will get feedback about your choices. All further requirements and guidelines can be found in the description texts on TUWEL.

Material

The main materials are the lecture slides. The latest slides and video recordings of the lectures will be uploaded to TUWEL.
Already available on TUWEL are lecture video recordings and slides from previous years.

The book "Real-Time Rendering, Fourth Edition", by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Eric Haines, Naty Hoffman, Angelo Pesce, Michal Iwanichi, and Sébastien Hillaire, A K Peters/CRC Press, 2018, may serve as complementary material.

A good resource for GLSL shader development is the book "OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition", by David Wolff, Packt Publishing, 2018

Communication

All important information will be announced through TUWEL. Please ensure to subscribe to its news forum and enable notification emails!

The TUWEL discussion forum will be used for discussions (and group finding) and will be monitored by tutors. If you have questions or problems with the lab part, this is the best place to ask.

In case of problems with TISS or TUWEL and for personal matters, please send us an email to: rtr@cg.tuwien.ac.at

Registration

The registration for the lab part is done via the TISS course 193.180. Please register there under "Course Registration". After registering, the TUWEL course can be accessed starting from 01.09.2027.

Everyone who submits a project proposal will get a grade!

Submission

All submissions are done through the TUWEL course. The submission guidelines are stated for each submission in TUWEL. Make sure to read and follow them thoroughly!

Make sure to read the documents Submission Requirements and Guidelines and Vislab PC Configuration in TUWEL!

Double-check that you submit all DLLs, shaders, textures, 3D-models and additional content in the correct folders. We can only grade demos that are running in our environment.