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CG fundamentals was my favourite course in college. Going from drawing lines with the Bresenham algorithm to drawing polygons, filling polygons with Scanline, implementing ZBuffer, texture mapping and so on. Was a lot of fun even though I never ended up working with CG except for some hobby projects.

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Agreed, its one of those areas of software that just feels like magic when you code it from scratch and end up with a 3D object on your screen.

Especially raytracing! What I used to do when teaching was taking a few weeks to develop the rasterizer, and then say "OK, 4 weeks to go, time to present your final project - you're making this <image of a raytraced scene with reflections and shadows>, which I'm going to explain within the next 2 hours". Some groups genuinely thought I was joking. But then every one of them managed to write a raytracer, their minds were blown, and they used their renders as desktop backgrounds. I loved that :)

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