15-505 and 60-414 Administrative Information for Spring 2005

Place and Time: Monday and Wednesday from 1:30 to 4:20
303 CFA for the inital meetings.

Instructor:

James Duesing

• Email: jduesing@andrew.cmu.edu
• Office: CFA 404
• Phone: x8-7807
• Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Jessica Hodgins

• Email: jkh@cs.cmu.edu
• Office: Newell-Simon Hall 4103
• Phone: x8-6795
• Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Teaching Assistants:

Online Resources

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jkh/aat

There will be a folder on the art server for this class which we will use for class-related storage and turn-in of material for critiques.

Prerequisites

• 15-462: Computer Graphics or
• 60-110 and 60-210: Electronic Media Studio I and II

Software

• Maya Unlimited 6.0 in Wean 5336 running on 24 Linux boxes donated by Intel. Maya Unlimited includes fluid effects, cloth, fur, and match moving software.
• Maya Complete 6.0 in CFA 317 running on Windows boxes.
• You can download the free Personal Learning Edition (Version 6) from here. Note: this version will NOT be adequate for most class assignments and we expect that you will need to do the majority of the class work in the clusters. There are also problems with compatability between the Learning Edition and other editions.

Optional Texts

• Maya Character Animation Jae-jin Choi. Available from the bookstore as well as amazon.com and other on-line sources.
• Inspired 3D Short Film Production Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valenica. Thomson Course Technology Available from the bookstore as well as on-line sources.

Other Texts and Sources

• Getting started with Linux
• The process of effective critiques. Jana Whittington, Educator's Forum, SIGGRAPH 2003.
• Art Criticism
• Tips for working in teams from Randy Pausch (bottom of the page)
• SIGGRAPH proceedings (in the E&S library and from the ACM Digital Library if you are on a campus machine)
• SIGGRAPH Video Review: some of these as well as nice collection of other 3D animation videos and dvds are available for viewing in the video library at Hunt Library.

Grading Information

• Class Attendance 12%
• Three Individual Assignments 11% each
• Storyboard Pitch 5%
• Project Webpage 7%
• Final project 43%
  • animatic 7%
  • models 7%
  • April 13th crit 7%
  • final presentation 22%

Assignments and Projects

There will be two kinds of assignments: individual assignments at the start of the semester and a final project. The individual assignments will be completed by each student, the final project will be completed in teams of about eight students.

All assignments will be turned in as frames. The final project will begin as a storyboard, morph into an animatic and gradually become a complete animation with fully rendered frames and audio.

Grading on programming assignments is based the ambitiousness of what you attempted and the quality of the result. We will spend class time critiquing the animations and assignments. The notion of a critique may be unfamilar to some in the class. See the supplemental readings above more an introduction to the concept.

Late policy

Assignments should be turned in on the day they are due by midnight. We will look at the time stamp on your files to verify that they were turned in on time.