15-463 Administrative Info for Spring 1998

Professor: Paul Heckbert

• Office: Doherty Hall 4301A
• Email: ph@cs.cmu.edu
• Office Hours: by appointment (send email)

• Office: Doherty Hall 4301D
• Email: jovan+ta@cs.cmu.edu
• Office Hours: Wed 3:30-4:30

• Office: Doherty Hall 4301G, phone 8-7897
• Email: plp@cs.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 is the primary online source for documents and info. The slides for batches of lectures will periodically be made available on the notes page. We recommend you print the lecture notes and take your own notes on them. Note that not all of the slides shown in lecture will be available electronically.

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 WWW page.

Public and private files for this class are in the AFS hierarchy /afs/andrew.cmu.edu/scs/cs/15-463/, which we call classdir. Each electronically registered student will get a subdirectory in classdir/students named after his or her Andrew ID, to be used for electronic submission of assignments, and to meet your class-related storage needs. The quota for your student directory will be 75 megabytes. Public files are in classdir/pub. This directory holds these WWW files, documentation, and starter code for assignments.

Prerequisites

• 15-462: Computer Graphics 1, or equivalent

Registrar's info about this course

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 try to use only the best parts of this book. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than anything else around.

Other Texts and Sources

• OpenGL Programming Guide, 2nd Edition: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.1 by Woo, Neider, and Davis, Addison Wesley, 1997. (first edition OK, too). You can read the OpenGL Programming Guide online using the Insight electronic documentation package on the SGI's. Type "insight &" into an SGI and go from there. 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.
• Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with OpenGL, Angel, Addison Wesley, 1997. 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. This book is 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 on 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 basement of Hunt Library

Grading Policies

• Midterm 13%
• Final 21%
• Programming Assignments 48 %
  • P1: fast Fourier transform
  • P2: modeling with bicubic surfaces
  • P3: keyframe animation
  • P4: advanced ray tracing
• Written Assignments 18%
  • W1: image processing
  • W2: modeling
  • W3: rendering

Late penalty on assignments: 1 point per CMU class day (a class day is a non-holiday weekday). Assignments WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED beyond 5 late points 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 written 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 Sparcs and SGI's. If you choose to use something non-standard (at your own risk), you'll need to make one available to us for demos.

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 last semester, 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. We suggest you keep user interface hacking to a minimum (at least don't let it interfere with getting the graphics working).

Computers

The ten Silicon Graphics Indy's in Wean 5205 are most recommended, since they have 24 bits per pixel (software on cluster machines) and 3-D graphics hardware. Note that 15-462 will be using these machines this semester also, so contention for these machines will be high. There are also ten SGI Octane's in CFA 317, which are even faster, but you have to request an account.

Sun workstations will also be supported, but they employ a software implementation of OpenGL that is about 10x slower than the hardware implementation on SGI's. The Sun Sparc Ultra Creators in Wean 5201 have 24 bits per pixel. Less desirable are the Sun Sparcs in Wean 5202 & 5204, which have only 8 bits per pixel. You might want to do software development on the Sparcs and final testing and demos on the SGI's.

Students have ported support software for this course to Linux in the past, so this is another option if you're willing to do the extra work. Also, there are PC's running Windows NT in Wean 5207.

Software libraries we will use: Xforms (user interface library), OpenGL (3D graphics library), Xlib (X window system), and SVL (vector/matrix library). See software page for more info.

15-463, Computer Graphics 2