Final Study Guide

The final exam is cumulative. It will cover topics from the entire course, including the last two weeks.

This is a rough outline - no promises that it includes everything (any ommission of a topic is not intentional).

For an outline of the first 12 weeks of class, see Exam 1 Study Guide and Exam2 Study Guide.

A more compact outline can be seen in the video outlines (which organizes things by lecture): Lecture Materials: Videos and Slides. This doesn’t include the workbooks or readings, but most important concepts were discussed in some video.

1. Animation by deformation/transformation
   • motivations
   • methods
     • skinning / matrix palettes
     • shape interpolation (morphing)
     • non-linear deformations
     • grid deformers
     • cages
2. 3D Shape Concepts
   • surfaces vs. solids
   • curves in 3D
3. Strategies for Surface models
4. Generalized Primitives for Surface Models
   • surfaces of revolution
   • generalized cylinders
   • sweeps (the general case of generalized cylinders)
   • lofting
5. Free Form Surfaces Basics
   • basic approaches
     • parametric
     • implicit
     • procedural / subdivision
6. Implicit Surfaces
   • basic idea
   • blob models (pros and cons)
7. Parametric Surfaces
   • basic idea
   • why are they so complicated
   • things we want to do with surface patches (but are hard to do with parametric surfaces)
8. Subdivision Surfaces
   • motivations
   • intuitions/definitions (limit curve)
   • 2D Examples (interpolating and non-interpolating)
   • triangle schemes
     • how to divide triangles
     • ordinary vs. extra-ordinary vertices
   • butterfly / modified butterfly
   • Loop scheme
   • Catmull-Clark
     • dividing quads
     • motivations
9. Rasterization concepts
   • Pixel sampling models
10. Rasterizing Lines
11. Triangle rasterization
    • definitions of coverage and its implications
    • potential for aliasing and artifacts
    • scanline
    • barycentric checks
12. Aliasing
    • basic concept
    • ways it appears in practice
      • texture downsampling
      • jaggies, crawlies
    • filtering intuitions
    • anti-aliasing approaches
13. Rendering
    • lighting phenomena in the real world
    • light-centric vs. object centric
    • ray/path vs. global methods
    • ray bounce mechanics and statistical models
    • BRDFs
    • Forward and Backwards ray tracing
    • Stochastic ray tracing
    • Recursive Ray Tracing
      • Specular and Diffuse rays
      • importance sampling
    • Ray Casting performance
    • Issues with sampling
    • Distribution ray tracing
      • uses of distribution