Candle Lights win Graphics Competition

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then the computer science corollary must be “a picture is worth a 1,000 lines of C++ code.”

That’s certainly the case for the computer science students at the University of California, San Diego who paint pictures with C++ computer programming code. Computer science professor Henrik Wann Jensen – winner of a 2004 Academy Award for his work on realistic, computer-generated human skin – taught the class: CSE 168: Rendering Algorithms.

For their final project, the Rendering Algorithms students pulled together what they’d learned about generating digital images from their own computer code and painted one final picture with C++.

The image above won the grand prize this year. Computer science master’s students Carlos Dominguez-Caballero and Holmes Futrell created the image. Congrats.

See first and second place and honorable mention images here.

See images from the final presentations here.

Read about how A Picture is Worth a 1,000 lines of C++ Code.