Week 13 - Graphics, Volumes, D3.js & How to learn new webdev things

This week will give a brief overview of graphics concepts and the rendering of images. We’ll also learn some D3.js and figure out how to learn new web development concepts.

Resources

For the D3.js portion, we’ll be starting from our previous Idyll website using:

• This index.idyll file.
• And this image.

For volume rendering in Python we’ll be using:

• This tiny cosmology dataset (~420Mb)

We will build to:

• This final index.idyll file
• This custom js script
• This custom js map

Outline of Topics

This week our objectives are: (1) understand how images are made from spatial datasets - rendering of 3D objects to make them look like/close to photos, (2) learn a bit of javascript, (3) see some methods to learn new viz software.

• Lecture
  1. Intro to 3D computer graphics concepts & tools
• Programming
  1. JS scripting in Idyll webpages
  2. How to add D3.js ideas into your webpage -> how to debug this process
  3. Volume rendering in Python

Extra resources

• pixar’s 2 minute video about rendering

Materials

• Lecture 13: (view, source, present)
• Notebook inClass_week13_volumeRendering: (view, download)
• Notebook prep_week13: (view, download)