Students are welcome to make use of the graphics lab in BioScience East 328. There are currently 11 workstations which are largely available for this course this semester. Anytime access with CAT card.
The text book is optional. Most of the course content will be on-line. Many students will find it helpful to refer to a text, and the choice listed below is the one with most overlap in content and style of the course. However, it is possible to get through this course without buying the book.
J.D. Foley, A. van Dam, S. Feiner, J. Hughes, and R. Phillips. Introduction to Computer Graphics. Addison-Wesley (1994).
This course will focus on fundamentals. We will make extensive use of basic linear algebra and geometry. A sound understanding of using matrices to represent transformations will be very helpful. You should be comfortable thinking about problems such as: Given a point, is it in the plane of a polygon? If so, and if the polygon is convex, is the point inside the polygon? What are the points of intersection of two polygons? I will go over the requisite math as it arises, but if you are not confident with your background, you may wish to contact the instructor to discuss it.
This course will have a heavy programming component.
This course will have both graduate and undergraduate students (including honors students). Graduate students will be expected to do the assignments at an accelerated pace, in order to leave extra room at the end of the course for a project. Research oriented projects will be strongly encouraged. Grad students may also be expected to master a modest amount of extra material, which may require some additional reading.
In consultation with the instructor, it may be possible for undergraduate students to substitute projects for assignments. This may be required of honor's students. (The exact requirement for honor's students will be finalized in the first week of classes in consultation with the honor's students taking the course).
If you want to see more details about what the course is like, you may wish to look at the slides from last year . We will likely cover the topics in a slightly different order this term, and there will be some modifications, but there will be perhaps 90% overlap with the material covered last term.
Undergraduate students
Assignments: 60%
Midterm: 15%
Final: 25%
Graduate students
Assignments: 70% (including one project)
Midterm: 10%
Final: 20%
Honors students (under construction --- waiting to meet with those students)
A convex combination of the above numbers.
A cumulative percentage of 90% guarantees an A, 80% guarantees a B, 70% a C, and
60% a D. Depending on overall class performance, these lines may be lowered a
bit (possibly differently for 433 and 533).
Programming assignments will be handed in electronically, and thus will be time stamped. Material to be submitted will include source code, a makefile, an executable, and likely other files as explained in the instructions for each given assignment.
The programs must build (and the executable must run) on Linux. The installations available on the machines in the graphics lab will be used as reference systems for submitted material. If programs are developed elsewhere, or on other OS's, they should be checked on these machines before being handed in.
The programming assignments are designed to both provide experience in writing interactive graphics software, and to help students learn specific theoretical material.
Exams must be attended at their appointed time unless you have permission in advance to do otherwise.
Assignment late policy: Late assignments will be accepted with penalty until five days late. From that point onwards, assignments will not be accepted. This is a matter of courtesy to your TA. The late penalty is 10% per day.
Some attempt will be made to detect violations of the University of Arizona's academic integrity policy. Specifically, exams and written assignment must be the sole work of the student. Students may help each other with the problem analysis and general strategies relevant to the programing assignments, but detailed help or code sharing is not permitted. All code in programming assignments will be assumed to have been written by the student (or student team) unless attribution is given. An obvious exception to this rule is sample code which has been provided by the instructor for this course through the course web page tree. Such code does not require attribution (we know where it came from). It is also permissible to include with attribution code from external sources provided that the code is published, has not been solicited, and was not written for course requirement for this or a similar course given elsewhere.