A Course In Programming And Computer Graphics Using Visual C++

This paper describes a course in computer graphics for seniors and graduate students in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo. The course involves 3D graphics theory but also focuses on programming for computer graphics. It is taught in a PC Windows environment with Microsoft’s Visual C++. The paper provides a brief history of the course and its relationship to our other computer aided design offerings. We discuss our strategy for introducing students to programming with VC++ including initial object-oriented exercises without graphics and then programming approaches for basic 2D graphics operations in windows. This is followed by an implementation of 3D graphics programming using an object-oriented format and, lastly, our approach to introducing OpenGL for the PC.