This course covers advanced topics in graphics and related technologies with a strong hands-on and interactive focus. Topics include: advanced features of OpenGL; 2D and 3D still, interactive and animated file formats; advanced modelling and animation techniques; detailed surface models; performance optimisation; radiosity; ray tracing and optimisations; Monte Carlo and metropolis rendering; volumetric rendering; image based rendering; interactivity; collision detection and 3D graphics hardware design. Students will be given the opportunity to present seminars on research areas of interest to them, as well as experience with 3D graphics software.
The subject will be extremely interactive. You'll be expected to be involved.
COMP3421 is a necessary prerequisite. You should have at least a credit-level performance in COMP3421. You should have experience with OpenGL and Java.
This is what we hope to cover. We may not be able to cover all of it and the coverage of particular topics depends on what those enrolled in the course would like to do. You will also have the chance to present material you are interested in in the second half of the course.
The textbook for the course is Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques by Watt & Watt.
Good references for the course are:
The first half of the course will be in the form of lectures on fundamental topics. These will be relatively in-depth. The second half of the course (or thereabouts) will be in the form of presentations by individual students or pairs of students. This presentation should be about 40 minutes or so, followed by a discussion. We will have two presentations per week. We will make a data projector available upon request.
It is expected that there will be a single lecture of Advanced Graphics on Wednesday evenings from 6 to 9. There will be no tutorials. Any tutorial material will be covered in lecture time.
We also hope to invite a couple of guest speakers from companies like Microforte (a games company, responsible for instance for the recent Fallout: Tactics game) and Animal Logic (a special effects company that was involved, for instance, in the production of The Matrix).
We may also be arranging labs with modelling tools. Right now, on the agenda is Blender, POVRay, POVLab and BMRT; but we'd like to add to this list.
You will be given the following additional facilities:
Please contact us if you find that these resources are not adequate.
Tim Lambert (email: lambert) and Waleed Kadous (email: waleed) will be co-lecturing the course.
There will be four assessable tasks:
Will be on advanced OpenGL and an exploration of optimisation techniques. Will be available in week 2 and due in week 6. It will be worth 10 per cent of your assessment. It should take approximately 15 hours to complete.
The course will consist of a software project of the student's choosing. It can be a game, a visualisation tool, a modelling tool or a renderer of a particular phenomenon (e.g. particles, birds etc). The timeline for the course is:
The projects will be assessed on originality, technical aptitude, completeness, usability and quality of code. You may attempt the project in groups if you so wish. It is worth 35 per cent of your assessment, including 5 per cent for your proposal.
Your project must include the CSE logo (either the cubes or the new cse-type logo) in some way, shape or form (it's to prove that you haven't simply downloaded something off the web and presented it as your own). You may borrow code from other projects and sources, but you must acknowledge the source and the work must be mostly your own.
This will be the presentation on a topic of interest within computer graphics. You will be expected to read SIGGRAPH papers, find and/or prepare demos for the course of this. As mentioned above, the presentation is expected to go for about 40 minutes, with a 20 minute questions/answers period. This is worth 20 per cent of your assessment.
The examination will be open book and will be worth 35 per cent of the assessment.
All marks will be added up directly. No harmonic mean will be applied.
For this subject, as in all subjects in the Department of Computer Science, assignments must be substantially your own work. Assignments are submitted on-line (that is, to a central account on the computer), and all submissions are routinely subject to scrutiny for similarities with other students' assignments. If you copy from another person, or get an unreasonable amount of help from a friend (so your assignment begins to look like theirs), or if you work very closely with someone, or, if you download and use software from the Web without acknowledgement there is a good chance we will detect it. When we do, you will be penalised. At the very least, you will lose some or all marks for that assignment. In the past, students have been automatically failed for submitting stolen assignments. Further details are given in the first section of the UNIX Primer.
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