Administrative Info: 15-463 Spring 95

Professor: Paul Heckbert

Office: Doherty Hall 4301A
Email: ph@cs.cmu.edu
Office Hours: Tue 4:30-5:30, or by appointment (send email)

Teaching Assistant: Zoran Popovic

Office: Doherty Hall 4306
Email: zoran@cs.cmu.edu
Office Hours: Wed 1:00-2:00

Non-electronic handouts missed in class may be picked up from my secretary:

Phyllis Pomerantz

Office: Doherty Hall 4301G, x8-7897
Email: plp@cs.cmu.edu

What's where

The class Home Page is the primary online source for documents and info.
The class newsgroup is cmu.cs.class.cs463. This bboard will serve as a Q&A forum. Feel free to ask questions or exchange information. We'll read the group and answer. We'll also post important official announcements there, as well as in the WWW page.
Each registered student will get a subdirectory in
/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/scs/cs/15-463/students
named after her/his Andrew ID, to be used for electronic submission of assignments, and to meet your class-related storage needs. To get a directory you need to sign in electronically.

Prerequisites

15-462 (computer graphics modeling, including knowledge of 4x4 affine and perspective transformations, parametric surfaces, polygon scan conversion), linear algebra, a little calculus.

Required Text

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2nd edition. Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes. Addison-Wesley, 1990.

Optional Texts

Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques, Watt and Watt. Addison-Wesley, 1992.
An Introduction To Ray Tracing, Andrew Glassner (ed.). Academic Press, 1989.
Digital Image Processing, Gonzalez and Woods. Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Grading

65% homework (probably 4 programming and 2 written). Late policy: 20% off per class day. The programming assignments will be:
- Assignment P1: morphing animation
- Assignment P2: ray casting (non-recursive ray tracing)
- Assignment P3: recursive ray tracing
- Assignment P4: radiosity
35% midterm & final

Computers

You can use any language or machine you like, but you must write the software yourself. A few accounts are available on the Silicon Graphics workstations in Doherty Hall 2300, which have 24 bits per pixel.

ph@cs.cmu.edu, zoran@cs.cmu.edu 01/19/95