15-463 Computer Graphics 2 - Administrative Info

Professor: Paul Heckbert

• Office: Newell Simon Hall 4130 until April (after that, NSH 4205)
• Email: ph@cs.cmu.edu
• Office Hours: Tue 12-1

Teaching Assistants:

Liu Ren Office: Newell Simon Hall 4222 Email: liuren@cs.cmu.edu Office Hours: Wed 3:30-4:30

Adrian Perez Office: none Email: amperez@andrew.cmu.edu Office Hours: email for appointment, for now

To email Paul and both TA's, please use 463-staff@cs

Course Secretary: Virginia Arrington

• Office: Newell Simon Hall 4224, phone 8-8126
• Email: va2@andrew.cmu.edu

Electronic Information

The class web page at /afs/andrew/scs/cs/15-463/pub/www/463.html or

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/andrew/scs/cs/15-463/pub/www/463.html

The class newsgroup is cmu.cs.class.cs463. This group 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 web page.

Public and private files for this class are in the AFS hierarchy

/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/scs/cs/15-463/

Prerequisites

• 15-462: Computer Graphics 1, or equivalent

Registrar's info about this course: schedule , course description (big PDF)

Required Text

• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2nd edition in C. Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes. Addison-Wesley, 1996 (1990 edition also OK). We use only parts of this book.

Other Texts and Sources

• OpenGL Programming Guide, 3rd Edition: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.2 by Woo et al, 1999. (earlier editions OK, too). Excellent tutorial guide on the OpenGL subroutine library for 3-D interactive graphics, highly recommended. Also available is its unreadable companion volume, the OpenGL Reference Guide, which mostly consists of man pages. Another book on OpenGL, the Reference Guide, is available in both printed and electronic forms, but it's a rather poor substitute for the Programming Guide. On an SGI, run "insight &" to get the Programming Guide.
• Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with OpenGL, 2nd edition, Angel, Addison Wesley, 2000. Nice book for learning both graphics and OpenGL.
• Digital Image Processing, Gonzalez and Woods. Addison-Wesley, 1992. Good coverage of filtering, Fourier transforms, image compression -- most relevant to the first 1/4 of the course. I've requested that this book be put on reserve at the E&S library.
• Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques, Watt and Watt. Addison-Wesley, 1992. Good for coverage of texture mapping, ray tracing, radiosity, volume rendering. Also requested for reserve.
• An Introduction To Ray Tracing, Glassner (ed.). Academic Press, 1989. Good for ray tracing.
• Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics, 2nd Edition. Rogers & Adams. McGraw-Hill. 1990. More focused than Foley; gives lots of examples. Good on spline curves, in particular.
• Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics, 2nd edition, Rogers, McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Also

• SIGGRAPH proceedings, published annually as special editions of the journal `Computer Graphics' (in the E&S library, with proceedings, not journals.)
• SIGGRAPH Video Reviews: some are available for viewing in the Hunt Library basement.

Grading Policies

• Midterm 13%
• Final 21%
• Programming Assignments 48%
  • A1: morph
  • A2: subdivision surfaces
  • A3: advanced ray tracing
  • A4: to be determined
• Homeworks 18%
  • HW1: filtering and Fourier transforms
  • HW2: ray tracing and related

Late penalty on assignments: 20% of their value per CMU class day (a class day is a non-holiday weekday) except in cases of medical emergencies or other special circumstances (speak to professor in advance, if possible). You may use Maple or similar systems to help with algebra on assignments, but where you do, turn in a transcript. There is no set formula for assigning letter grades in this class. In particular, to get a good grade you need to do well in both the programming assignments and the written assignments.

Assignments and Homework

There will be two kinds of assignments: Programming assignments and homeworks.

For programming assignments, we encourage you to use the software tools we provide (which means working on a platform we support, or bringing the tools up on some other platform yourself.) Supported platforms will be Andrew cluster Linux PC's and Sparcs. If you choose to use something non-standard, you're more on your own. The current plan is that all assignments will be done individually, not in groups.

Grading on programming assignments is based on your programs' functionality, usability, and on the quality of the animations or images you produce. In the assignment handouts, we will clearly identify the required or extra credit features. You must write these portions of the software yourself. (Two students were caught stealing & exchanging code in 15-462 recently, and they were punished). Other portions of the software are not required to be your own work. Libraries for user interfaces, model file parsing, and picture I/O can be shared or borrowed. If you borrow software from elsewhere (e.g. another student, a book, the internet), you should tell the professor or TA. You are free to discuss the assignments with others, but do not copy each others' work.

This is not a user interface course. If you feel compelled to hone your UI, we suggest you finish the requirements of the assignment first and only then polish your user interface.

The homeworks are more mathematical and algorithmic in nature, and give you a preview of the kinds of questions you might expect on the midterm and final.

Computers

The Wean cluster includes:

• PC's running Linux in Wean 5203 - highly recommended. They have Nvidia graphics cards with 3D graphics hardware.
• Suns in Wean 5201, 5202, and 5204 - typically slower than the PC's, since their graphics hardware is much more primitive. On these machines we make heavy use of Mesa, a software implementation of OpenGL.

Note that 15-462 will be using these machines this semester also, so contention for these machines may be high at times. Joel Welling, the instructor for that course, and I have attempted to schedule the assignments to minimize such problems. If you can't find a machine in Wean, you could always try the other clusters on campus. Also good, if you have access to them, are SGI workstations. Although their processor speeds are slower than top-of-the-line PC's, their graphics performance is sometimes faster (depends on the model).

Also, there are PC's running Windows NT in Wean 5205 and 5207, but if you use these, you'll be more on your own.

Digital video equipment is available in the CFA Multimedia Studio.

Software libraries we will use: FLTK (user interface library), OpenGL (3D graphics library), Xlib (X window system), and SVL (vector/matrix library). Support code for some assignments is written in C, for others, it is written in C++. See software page for more info.

15-463, Computer Graphics 2