15-462 Administrative Info

15-462 Administrative Info for Spring 2000

Place and time: TuTh 10:30 - 11:50am, 7500 Wean Hall, 18 January - 4 May 2000.

Instructor: Paul Heckbert

Email: ph+@cs.cmu.edu
Office: Newell-Simon 4205, phone: 8-7899
Office Hours: Tuesday 12-1pm or by appointment (send email)

Teaching Assistant 1: Chris Rodriguez

Email: cjr2+462@andrew.cmu.edu
Office: Wean 3130, phone 8-4008
Office Hours: by appointment (send email)

Teaching Assistant 2: Adrian Perez

Email: amperez@andrew.cmu.edu
He can often be found in the Baker or Wean NT cluster.

Online Resources

The class web page is at

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15462/web/462.html

This is the primary online source for information about the course, including assignments, lecture notes, and administrative details. We recommend you print the notes before each lecture (when available) and take your own notes on them.

The class newsgroup is cmu.cs.class.cs462. (Previous link does nothing? See this.) 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. For truly urgent requests, email 462-staff@cs or phone.

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

/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/scs/cs/15-462/students

named after your Andrew ID, to be used for electronic submission of assignments, and to meet your class-related storage needs. IMPORTANT: If you are registered and your directory is not set up when you need it, contact us ASAP.

The other afs directory is

/afs/cs/academic/class/15462

It holds these WWW pages, useful libraries and utilities, documentation, and 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)
15-213: not required, but helpful

Required Text

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2nd edition in C. Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes. Addison-Wesley, 1996. This text covers a lot of ground and is a good reference book on computer graphics. We will cover only the material that is relevant to this course and ignore the rest (e.g., we don't cover PHIGS, User Interfaces, etc.). 15-463 also uses this book.

Other Texts and Sources

OpenGL Programming Guide, 2nd (or 3rd) Edition: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.1 by Woo, Neider, and Davis, Addison Wesley, 1997. highly recommended that you buy this.
SIGGRAPH proceedings, published annually as special editions of the journal `Computer Graphics' (in the E&S library, with proceedings, not journals.)
SIGGRAPH Video Review: some are available for viewing at Instructional Technology

Grading Policies

(Subject to change)

Midterm 13%
Final 22%
Programming Assignments 45 %

Assignment 1 (6%): Write a Paint Program
Assignment 2 (13%): Surface Modeling
Assignment 3 (13%): Animation
Assignment 4 (13%): Ray Casting

Written Homework 20% (6+7+7)

Late penalty on programming assignments: 1 point per CMU class day. Assignments WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED beyond 5 late points. Weekends and holidays are not counted, that is, the "late clock" stops at midnight on Friday and resumes at midnight on Sunday. You may use Maple or similar systems to help with algebra on assignments, but where you do, turn in a transcript. There is no simple 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 work (exams and homeworks.)

Assignments and Homework

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

You may discuss assignments with other students, but sharing answers or using someone else's code (with the exception of utilities as described below) constitutes cheating.

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 Linux PCs. We will not support NT to the same level. 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, although you are free to use the software tools that we provide or comparable tools that perform the same purpose.

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

You can use any language or machine you like, although the support code we provide will be C or C++, and the primary machines we're supporting are Sun Sparcstations and PC's running Linux. Information is available on software support on various cluster platforms.

Machines with 24 bits per pixel are preferable, since they have better color resolution. On a 16 or 8 bit display, color pictures must typically be displayed with dithering that masks the true appearance of your pictures. This is more of an issue in the later assignments, where image quality is of greater concern.

A good collection of machines is in the Wean 5200 cluster. It will be possible for you to do the assignments on 8-bit color workstations (such as the Sparcs in Wean 5202 and 5204). In terms of image quality, the Linux PC's in Wean 5203 are better, since they have NVIDIA Riva TNT PCI graphics cards with 16 bit color. Unfortunately, the combination of Mesa OpenGL and Linux driver on those machines isn't currently giving us full use of the 3-D graphics hardware on those machines. (Tell us if you know how to rectify this!!). Highest image quality will result on the Sun Sparc Ultra Creators in Wean 5201. They have 24 bit color, but unfortunately, no 3-D graphics hardware. There are PC's running Windows NT in Wean 5205 and 5207. You can work on those, but we won't be supporting NT to the same extent as Suns and Linux PC's.

There are also nine SGI Octane's in CFA 317, which have the fastest graphics hardware, but you have to request an account, and they're not on the Andrew File System. This Multimedia Studio also has a large flatbed scanner, a 3' wide color printer, and digital video equipment. You can borrow digital video cameras.

The Media Lab in Cyert Hall has a color printer and video equipment, available by reservation. There is also another color printer in Cyert Hall.

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

Other computer graphics-related courses at CMU

15-462, Computer Graphics 1
Paul Heckbert, Jan. 2000