Modeling, Synthesis and Rendering Fractals

Description of Proposed Activities

1)      To develop additional instructional material for the course CSC 470 Graphics consisting of two main components: theoretical (lecture notes and power point presentation) and practical (programs and demos).

·   The theoretical component aims to provide students with fundamental concepts in fractal graphics and fractal mathematical techniques. It will help them to understand the difference between most geometric shapes, like circles, triangles, rectangles, and other polygons, which have specific measurable perimeter and measurable area and fractals for which the areas and perimeters are infinite.

·   The aim of the practical component is to assist in and strengthen students' understanding of algorithms and methods, and teach students how to write effective and efficient computer graphics programs.

2)      To incorporate the following four modules into the above instructional material:  

·   Design and modeling of two distinct groups of fractal structures: self-similar and self–  repeating.

·   Implementation and design of L Systems algorithms for creating realistic looking objects that occur in nature and in particular the branching structure of plants. One of the important characteristics of L systems is that only a small amount of information is required to represent very complex objects.

·   Using the recursion to fashion very complex curves by repeated refinement. Example: design of Koch curves.

·   Design of fractal generator able to replace polygons by a suitably scaled, rotated, and translated version of the polygons in the generator