Ideas for papers and projects

CS 99D - The Science of Art
Winter Quarter, 2000
Marc Levoy
Handout #2

Artistic

• Reproduce one of Brunneleschi's panels, now lost, in which he demonstrated to his amazed contemporaries his ability to construct correct linear perspective views. Kemp's book tells you how.
  
  
• Model and render the 3D scene corresponding to a famous painting. Use a commercially available modeling and rendering system such as SoftImage or Alias/Maya; we have these software packages in our laboratory. For an extra kick, script, render, and record on video a flyaround of the scene. Alternatively, convert it into a form that can be navigated interactively on one of our high-performance graphics workstations. Beware: many paintings do not have a single, consistent 3D interpretation!

Programming

• Write a RenderMan shader that implements a nonphotorealistic rendering style. Although not really programming per se, this project does require some understanding of programming language constructs. For some fun, try to mimic the style of a famous artist. Can you draw pictures that exhibit Leonard's sfumato, or Durer's hatchings? How about Monet's brushstrokes? Can you render our 3D computer model of Michelangelo's David in a way that makes it look like his Sistine Chapel paintings? Or like his drawings?
  
  
• Program a tone reproduction operator that squeezes the large dynamic range of a synthetically rendered image into the limited dynamic range of a particular artist's media. Use a canned renderer to generate the images, Try your operator on hard scenes, like a moonlit scene or a sunlit scene with deep shadows. For extra credit, implement an operator that employs local contrast effects to extend the dynamic range of the media, as artists do. See me for some references to the graphics literature.

Writing

• The recent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling suggests that Michelangelo, rather than employing the Renaissance discovery that shadows should be dark, tending toward black, instead adhered to medieval tradition, in which shadows were fully saturated with color. If correct, then this radically changes our view of Michelangelo and his art. If, on the other hand, we have cleaned away Michelangelo's intended tones, as some critics claim, then we have ruined his masterpiece forever. Read one of the many books about the cleaning. Then read James Beck's scathing condemnation of it in Art Restoration: the Culture, the Business, and the Scandal. Who is right?
  
  
• Trace the scientific and artistic history of some optical theme that we did not cover in class, such as motion blur or depth of field. If you choose motion blur, don't forget to talk about its use in cartoon animation. If you choose depth of field, don't forget to talk about the invention of photography and its effect on our expectations about art.
  
  
• Trace the history of some category of artist's tools, such as pigments, brushes, or sculpting chisels. When were the key technological advances? What effect did they have on art?

Building

• Build and demonstrate one of the artist's perspective drawing aids described in M. Kemp's The Science of Art. Choose wisely. Some of them are too easy; others are too hard. I'm happy to help you select one.
  
  
• Build a display model of one of the 3D color systems described in M. Kemp's The Science of Art. Use any color reproduction medium you like to make the chips; a color ink-jet printer might work well.

For more ideas, look at the final projects from the last two years. The URLs are: http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs99d-98/online_projects.html and http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs99d-99/online_projects.html.
For a good example of a project that we placed online, look at: David Anderson's "Perspective Assistant". The URL is http://www.stanford.edu/~sprout/perspective/.