This Summer 2025 offering will have a focus on in-person class activities, something that we typically cannot do in the Fall offerings due to the larger class sizes in the Fall. We will still have accommodations for SCPD/CGOE students that plan to take this class virtually. However, on-campus Stanford students will be required to attend the lectures and participate in the activities in-person.
If you are looking for the Fall 2024 quarter website, then you can find it here!
CS 148 fulfills the General Education Requirements (GER) as a Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing (WAYS) course in the Creative Expression (WAY-CE) area. To satisfy this category, students need to enroll under the Letter Grade grading option; the WAY-CE requirement is not met by the Credit/No Credit option.
Course Announcements
| Summer 2025 | Welcome to the CS 148 Summer 2025 Website!
Students should make sure they have access to the class Ed page for future announcements. |
Course Logistics
- Course Instructors: Kevin Li (kevli *at* CS.stanford.edu), Sarah Jobalia (sjobalia *at* stanford.edu).
- Course Assistants: TBD
- In-person lectures are Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am to 11:45am, in Gates B1.
- Grading: 50% assignments, 10% weekly quizzes, 40% final project. There will be no final exam, though there will be a final project presentation.
- In-person attendance is required for on-campus Stanford students; recordings of the lectures will be available on Canvas for SCPD/CGOE students.
- Office Hours: TBD
- For any questions about the course, please contact the staff on Ed!
Summary
This is the introductory, prerequisite course in the computer graphics sequence that introduces students to the technical concepts behind creating computer generated images. This course is structured for in-person learning, and uses a range of interactive and hands-on techniques to draw the connection between real world phenomena and their virtual counterparts. Through this course, students will gain a firm working knowledge of the underlying mathematical concepts of synthetic imagery (including triangles, meshes, normals, interpolation, world spaces, texture mapping, etc.) Students will also explore the fundamentals of light and color and how they interact with the environment through lighting, shading, and material models varying in realism and complexity. Ultimately, students will come to an understanding of rasterization and ray tracing technology for creating visually-compelling synthetic images, and briefly examine how they extend to simulation and animation. Students will additionally be exposed to a high-level survey of topics in computer graphics, such as acceleration structures, anti-aliasing, and depth of field. Starter code will be provided to guide students through development and give them familiarity with industry-level tools. The class will conclude with a final project in which students pursue in-depth a specific topic of interest. This course is in-person, recordings will be made available only to SCPD/CGOE students.
This is the first course in the computer graphics sequence at Stanford. Topics include: Scanline Rendering; Triangles; Rasterization; Transformations; Shading; Triangle Meshes; Subdivision; Marching Cubes; Textures; Light; Color; Cameras; Displays; Tone Mapping; BRDF; Lighting Equation; Global Illumination; Radiosity; Ray Tracing; Acceleration Structures; Sampling; Antialiasing; Reflection; Transmission; Depth of Field; Motion Blur; Monte Carlo; Bidirectional Ray Tracing; Light Maps.
Prerequisites:
- CS 107, MATH 51
- Must be fluent in Python.
- We will assume knowledge of the following mathematical topics
- Vectors, vector operations, and vector spaces
- Matrices
- Basic linear algebra, such as solving a system of linear equations