Contents

• What's New?
• Weekly Schedule and Assignments
• Semester Project Information and Proposals
• Course Description
• Time and Place
• Instructor and Graduate Teaching Assistant
• Text Books
• Grading and Late Assignments
• Lab Submission Instruction
• On-line Resources
• Gallery of Work by Past CS410 Students

What's New?

April 26: WebCT now includes your semester grade so far. This includes everything except the final project, which is 25% of your grade.

April 18: rotatebox.c now includes comments at the top showing how to compile this on one of our Suns or Linux boxes.

to Contents

Weekly Schedule and Assignments

to Contents

Semester Project Information

You will be required to design and complete a project. Projects may consist of just library work researching a graphics technique, the implementation and use of a graphics algorithm not covered in our assignments, or some combination of library and computer work. The purpose of the project is to give you a chance to learn more about an aspect of computer graphics that you are very curious about.

You must discuss what you plan to do with the instructor. Mid-semester you will be required to submit a short, three to four page written proposal of what you plan to do. You may be asked to modify the plan by the instructor. You plan must include a tentative timeline of at least five milestones.

This is a great chance to learn how to use LaTeX, a high-quality text formatting tool. As an example, here is a LaTeX file that produces this postscript file, from which you can produce this Adobe Acrobat PDF file. You may use this file as a start for your proposal.

At the end of the semester, you must submit a written report of at least ten pages, covering what your objective was, why it interested you, how you accomplished your objective, what you learned as a result, and the list of references and resources that you used. You will also present your project orally to the class with the aid of overhead transparencies or with a laptop and data projector.

Here is a list of project proposal titles for this semester. If you see someone else's project that sounds very similar to yours, you may discuss a team project with them and with the instructor. If you decide to work together, you must submit a new, joint proposal clearly stating what the responsibilities will be of each team member. Your team will be expected to produce much more than an individual project. Do not feel obligated to work with someone if they ask you to be on a team. The decision is yours.

• Einstein's Snapshots: Visualizing the Consequences of Special Relativity, Nathan Brown,
• Integer-based Graphics Manipulation for Speed and Portability, Michael Dwyer,
• UI Design and the CS410 UI, John Erickson,and Lee Gonzales
• VRML: History, Standards & Applications, Lacy Fuller,
• Computer Animation, William Jones,
• Computer Animation Design, Lixin Li,
• Creating Realistic Plants Using Computer Graphics, Diana Malmstrom,
• 3D Game World, Matthew Ritzman,
• Global Illumination, Ryan Roark,
• Scene Graphing, Todd Schlomer,
• Model of the Third Floor of Morgan Library, Prommarart Senakit,
• VRML Design for a Virtual Town, Kai She,
• Object-Oriented Solid Modeling, Scott Smith,
• 3D Rendering in Java, Clint Thatcher,
• Graphical Representation of Lindenmeyer Systems, Mary Tupper
• Techniques Used in Hardware 3D Accelerators, Danny Wang,
• Java Swing Implementation of CS410 GUI, Helen Yang

Course Description

Course work will involve reading the assigned textbook chapters, participating in discussions of the material in class, completing homework exercises, four to six programming assignments, and a semester project. Students will be required to write fairly complex C, C++, or Java programs involving matrix calculations and linked lists. The project will be of each student's own design, approved by the instructor. At the end of the semester, a written report must be turned in describe the methods followed and the results, and each student will present their project orally to the class. Projects may be based on library and web research with no programming effort, or they may be primarily a programming effort, perhaps implementing an algorithm not assigned in class, or they may be a combination of library research and implementation.

Prerequisites for this course are a good working knowledge of data structures such as linked lists, trees, symbol tables, and dynamically allocated structures. You will need to know how to implement these data structures in C, C++, or Java. Experience with debugging tools, such as gdb and ddd will be very helpful. This course will also draw on knowledge of 2D and 3D geometry of vectors and coordinate systems, and on the use of matrix algebra for coordinate transformations. To successfully complete this course, you should be familiar with material related to the above topics covered in M229 (Matrices and Linear Equations), CS200 (Algorithms and Data Structures), and CS314 (Software Development Methods).

to Contents

Time and Place

• 12:30 - 1:45 Tu, Th,   Clark A205

Instructor and Graduate Teaching Assistant

• Chuck Anderson,
• E-mail: anderson@cs.colostate.edu
• Phone: 970-491-7491. FAX: 970-491-2466
• Office: 225 USC
• Office Hours: Wednesdays 12:00 - 2:00, Fridays 9:00 - 11:00

• Jilin (Tom) Tu
• E-mail: tu@cs.colostate.edu
• Phone: 970-491-1056
• Office: 200 University Services Center
• Office Hours: Wednesdays, 6:00PM - 10:00PM in south lab

Text Books

• Computer Graphics, C version, Donald Hearn and M. Pauline Baker (second edition), (here is another link to the book that includes C source code and an OpenGL Supplement), and
• OpenGL Programming Guide, Third Edition, Addison Wesley Developers Press (Optional)

Students are responsible for doing the assigned reading prior to the lecture for which the reading assignment is indicated in the course schedule.

to Contents

Grading and Late Assignments

For homework and programming assignments, the due date will be noted on the assignment sheet; assignments are due at the start of the class period on the due date. Assignments turned in after the start of the class in which they are due will be considered late. Assignments which are one class period late will be penalized by 10%. Assignments which are two class periods late will be penalized by 30%. After two class periods, late assignments will not be accepted.

Students are encouraged to talk with each other in general terms about what you are learning in this course. However, the work you turn in must be your own. Make sure that you write your own programs and assignments unless you are working as part of a team approved by the instructor. Do not copy another student's program (neither with nor without their knowledge) or write code for another student. When two programs are found to be substantially the same, cheating will be suspected and the parties involved will be asked to explain. The result could be zero credit for all parties. Additional guidelines related to academic integrity (cheating), incompletes and class attendance can be found in the department policy statement. The guidelines outlined in these documents will be followed in this course.

to Contents

Lab submission

1. Create a directory with the name <your last name>_<SSN>_Lab#. For example
   

   mkdir Robert_123456789_Lab1       or
   mkdir Tom_987766666_Lab4
   

2. Copy your programs into this directory (including Makefile and data). Make sure that your program can be compiled and run in this directory. For example,
   

   cp Makefile Robert_123456789_Lab1
   cp lab1.c Robert_123456789_Lab1
   cd Robert_123456789_Lab1
   make lab1  (checking to see if it compiles)
   lab1       (checking to see if it runs)
   rm *.o
   rm lab1    (delete the executable and obj files)
   

3. Change directory to upper directory:

   cd ..
   

4. Archive the directory in a tar file named lab#.tar, where # is the lab number:

   tar cvf lab1.tar Robert_123456789_Lab1
   

5. Run the CS410 checkin program to check in your tar file:

   ~cs410/bin/checkin410 lab1.tar    (if running on a Sun)
   ~cs410/bin/checkin410hp lab1.tar  (if running on an HP)
   

   If your submission succeeds, you will find a file <your unix account name>-lab#.tar in directory ~cs410/Checkin:

   ls ~cs410/Checkin
   
     robert_lab1.tar
   

to Contents

On-Line Resources

• X Windows Use and Programming
  • Help for understanding X Resources,
  • Tutorial on Xlib, Xt, and motif. Easy-to-read. Leads you through a number of examples that use Motif and X.
  • Huge list of X and Motif sites
  • The Motif Zone, lists many useful sites. Find tutorials by clicking on "Resources" and then on "Training" in the menu on the left side of the screen. Some of the tutorial links are listed below.
  • Xlib tutorial, deals with the lowest level of X Window programming,
• OpenGL
  • rotatebox.c, a C simple program that draws a hollow box that can be rotated by the mouse. The comments at the top of the C source file show how to compile this, or use this Makefile to compile it.
  • OpenGL site at SGI, including some great examples here.
  • OpenGL Tutorial, from Tulane
  • GL4Java, click on Products
  • JSparrow, An Implementation of Java binding for OpenGL
• General Graphics
  • The Web Directory for Computer Graphics
• Makefiles
  • One from Opus Software
  • A short and sweet one from CMU
• Teapots
  • The History of The Teapot, by Steve Baker. Yes, there actually is an original teapot.

to Contents