EECS 487: Interactive Computer Graphics
Course Information

Fall 2007

Topics

The course will address the following topics:

Mathematics for Computer Graphics: Points, vectors, matrices, linear algebra, triangles, barycentric coordinates, interpolation, 2D and 3D rigid transformations, and 3D viewing and perspective.
Rendering:Scan line and ray tracing techniques, antialiasing, illumination and reflection models for surfaces, shadowing, texture mapping, radiosity, GPU programming.
Geometric Modeling: Meshes, modeling hierarchies, splines, implicit curves and surfaces, procedural models, and user interfaces.
Animation: Principles of animation. Keyframe animation.

Grading

Each student's final grade will be based on two exams, five programming projects, three-four homework assignments, and a small class presentation/paper, as follows:

Midterm exam: 15%
Final exam: 15%
Projects (programming assignments): 50%
Homeworks: 15%
Class presentation/small paper: 5%

Assignments

Programming projects

There will be four programming projects.

Project 1: Raster graphics. Scan converting lines and triangles. Basic shading and color interpolation, simple anti-aliasing.
Project 2: 3D scene rendering. Implement lighting and shading calculations, and setup perspective scene viewer.
Project 3: Animation. Create and render an animated scene with nested transforms. Control animation using splines. Use textured meshes.
Project 4: Ray tracing. Implement a ray tracer, including effects such as hard shadows, reflections, and refraction through transparent surfaces.

Late policy: We will NOT accept late submissions. This is a firm policy. If you wait too long to start work, you risk getting a 0 on the project. Start early, and plan to have it finished a few days ahead of the due date. Note that many unexpected problems arise during programming. In addition, the computer labs can become crowded, and computers crash and networks fail. Extensions will not be given even if these things happen. Plan for these things to happen. They will!

Early policy: There will be a bonus for early submissions of the programming projects. Submitting 2 days early will be worth a bonus of 4% of the maximum score. Submitting 1 day early will be worth an added 2%.

Written Homeworks

There will be four written homework assignments, generally based on the text book material.

Class presentation/small paper

Five percent of your grade will come from either doing a 15-20 minute presentation in class or a small paper (3-4 pages) on a computer graphics related topic of your choice (approved by the instructor). We will be setting up presentation schedule in the first weeks of the course.

CAEN Account

You are required to have a CAEN account to take EECS 487. Among other reasons, you will need it to access some of the course materials. (Most students will already have one, because Engineering students and LS&A computer science majors all have CAEN accounts.) We are providing 100MB of disk space on CAEN servers for each EECS 487 student to use for course work.

Honor code and policy on cooperation: All students taking this class are expected to abide by the Honor Code of the College of Engineering. This means that all assignments, programming projects, and exams are covered by the Honor Code. In general, all work is to be that of each individual. Students must not share code or designs related directly to the content of a project, but can discuss questions about the assignment, the support code, general coding techniques, and the general principles of graphics algorithms. (The class phorum is a good place to discuss such questions.) Violation of this policy is grounds to initiate an action with the Dean's office that may come before the College of Engineering's Honor Council. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about this policy.

Getting Help

A good way to get individualized help is to go to office hours (listed on the main course web page). In addition, you can get help online via the EECS 487 phorum. This is a great way to ask questions and get answers. (You can also answer other students' questions -- and get contribution points for doing it!) Lee and Manoj prefer this to email, because it helps us avoid answering the same questions repeatedly. We ask that you do not post your project-specific code on the phorum. If you have a code-specific question that requires we look at your code, come to office hours.

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