15-462 Administrative Info for Fall 1997

Professor: Paul Heckbert

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

• Office: Wean Hall 4615, phone 8-3347
• Email: cavalier@cs.cmu.edu
• Office Hours: Mon 11-12 or by appointment (send email)

• Office: Wean Hall 8303, phone 8-2993
• Email: thkang@cs.cmu.edu
• Office Hours: Wed 12:30-1:30 or by appointment (send e-mail)

• Office: Doherty Hall 4301G, phone 8-7897
• Email: plp@cs.cmu.edu

Electronic Information

The class web page at /afs/cs/academic/class/15462/web/462.html or http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15462/web/462.html is the primary online source for documents and info.

The class newsgroup is cmu.cs.class.cs462. 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.

There are two afs hierarchies relevant to the class. Each electronically registered student will get a subdirectory in

/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/scs/cs/15-462/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 other afs directory is

/afs/cs/academic/class/15462 .

It holds these WWW files, documentation, and some starter code for assignments.

Prerequisites

• 15-212: Fundamental Structures of Computer Science II
• 21-241: Matrix Algebra (i.e. matrix & vector algebra)
• 21-259: Calculus in Three Dimensions (i.e. planes, quadratic surfaces, basic 3-D geometry, partial derivatives)
• Note that the registrar's on-line info about this course lists the prerequisites incorrectly.

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. In particular, we scrupulously ignore everything pertaining to PHIGS. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else around. 15-463 will probably also use this book.

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.
• Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with OpenGL, Angel, Addison Wesley, 1997. Nice book for learning both graphics and OpenGL. It could almost be the textbook for this course, but it's skimpy on some subjects we need.
• Digital Image Processing, Gonzalez and Woods. Addison-Wesley, 1992. Most relevant to the first few lectures of the course.
• Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques, Watt and Watt. Addison-Wesley, 1992. Good for coverage of texture mapping, ray tracing, radiosity, volume rendering.
• 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. (available Oct. '97).

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 22%
• Programming Assignments 45 %
• A1: interactive paint program (6%)
• A2: 3-D modeling (13%)
• A3: 3-D animation (13%)
• A4: ray casting (13%)
• Written Homework 20% (2+9+9)

Late penalty on programming assignments: 1 point per CMU class day (we mean it!). Assignments WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED beyond 5 late points. 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 homeworks.

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. Programs must of course be your own individual work, except that you can use the software tools we provide, or comparable ones, plus any other utility code that doesn't bear on the meat of the assignment.

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

It will be possible for you to do the assignments on 8-bit color workstations (such as the Sparcs in Wean 5201, 5202, and 5204) or PC's, but the software implementation of OpenGL on these machines will be about 10x slower than the hardware implementation on SGI's, and the image quality will also be degraded some. The Sun Sparc Ultra Creators in Wean 5201 have 24 bit color, but still no hardware OpenGL. You might want to do software development on the Sparcs and final testing and demos on the SGI's.

Some software libraries we will use are Xforms (user interface library), OpenGL (3D graphics library), and Xlib (X window system). See software page for more info.

15-462, Computer Graphics 1