Alexander Calder's Mobile (Mobile), 1941.

 15-462 Computer Graphics
 Assignment #3 - Mobile Animation


 Due Friday October 3, 2003, Midnight

Overview

As discussed in lecture, hierarchical modeling is a powerful tool in computer graphics and animation. In this assignment you will implement a program that animates a rotating mobile suspended from the ceiling. A mobile provides a prototypical example of animation employing hierarchical modeling. You will also experiment with lighting, material properties, and shadows. Besides the code, you are also required to hand in an animation as a sequence of images that your program generates by reading the contents of the frame buffer and then writing it to a file in JPEG format.

We do not specify precisely what the mobile should look like, or which ornaments are suspended from the ends, so there is some artistic freedom in this assignment. Apart from examples provided from last semester's students on the first day of class, see a sample of David Baraff's work on an extremely complex mobile here. For those of you more artistically inclined, you may wish to look up the work of Alexander Calder.

Functionality Requirements

Lighting and Material Properties

Animation

Grading

Extras

Hints

Further Information

There is no starter code, but you should reuse the image reading and writing library from assignment 1. A code snippet shows one way to read pixels from the frame buffer in OpenGL and write them to a file.

Submission

Please submit your code along with your makefile and any other files used (images, etc) to/afs/andrew/scs/cs/15-462/students/your_andrew_id/, in a sub-directory called asst3. Running "make" in this directory should compile your program successfully, and your program should function properly when run from this directory--if not, you've left out a necessary file. Within this directory, make a sub-directory called movie, and place the frames for your animation within, numbered as described above.

As mentioned above, do not forget to include a README file with your submission, documenting your solution to implementing shadows, and also any extra credit features. Any undocumented extra credit will be ignored.

Please adhere exactly to the guidelines for directory and file names for your program and your images. We will be generating a class movie with your image files, and need to run a script on them to do this--for it to work, all names must be uniform.