We’re now far enough along in the semester that I can give some more specifics on how I intend to give grades in class. Nothing really changes from the original Grading (and late policy) - it’s just that we now have more details, and some experience where there was ambiguity.

We’re now through 7 weeks of the semester. We’ve had the midterm. We’ve had a survey where I got some insight on how things are working. We’ve had a bunch of assignments.

It’s time to “re-plan” for what will happen in the second half. I can’t change too much (I need to fit within existing expectations) but I think we can make some fixes. Here’s both a “status update” and a sense of the plan for the coming weeks.

Portfolio 2 will be a chance for you to do things you’ve already done, but better. In workbooks 6-9, you had to make various objects to try out concepts. In this portfolio, you need to make those same objects - it’s just a chance to make nicer versions of them.

The real learning goal of this topic is to understand how the graphics hardware works, and how we can program it.

We need to know how the hardware works so that we can use it effectively (it will explain why some things seem weird). We also need to understand the graphics hardware so we can program it (write Shaders). Let me stress: shader programming won’t make sense unless you understand the graphics hardware.

In practice, this is becoming less important: the high level APIs (such as THREE) have written really good, flexible shaders - so the reasons to write your own are less common (the big ones are procedural textures and special effects).

The fifth topic is about appearance in 3D, but it is mainly about texture - how we add more visual interest to our objects by changing how we “color” our objects (not by making the objects themselves more complex).

Here again, there is all the interesting stuff that makes it work, and then there’s the practical aspects of using a high-level API and graphics hardware (that takes care of the details for us). The focus in the workbooks is on using the ideas. We’ll dig deeper into how things work as well.

1. There will be 2 exams, given online. One will be given in the evening of Thursday, March 6. The other one will be given in the official University Final Examination time slot.
2. Each exam will be administered using Canvas Quizzing.
3. Each exam will consist of 3 short segments. You must complete all 3 segments within the exam time window.

This fourth topic week gets us to 3D! The workbooks focus on 3D programming - using the basic mechanisms to make stuff. The readings talk about what is going on “underneath the hood”. It is hard to make the connections: the high-level APIs we use hide the details. However, it is worth it to spend the effort to learn the underlying math.

For our first “portfolio” assignment, you will assemble a “web” that shows off programs that demonstrate that you can apply the ideas we learned about in class to create actual graphics programs.

The third week of assignments focus on Curves - a tricky topic that I find fascinating. In the regular class, we divide it between a (rather long) workbook, and a programming assignment (the train). For this class, we’ll move the train to the portfolio (next week), so you can take more time to dig into curves (and get a head start on the portfolio).

The second week of assignments focus on one of the most important ideas in computer graphics: transformations. The idea is that geometry is much easier to think about/work with if we do it in a convenient coordinate system - so we make sure to describe things in convenient coorinate systems, and use transformations to move between those coordinate systems. We’ll explore the use of transformations in 2D (trust me, it is better to understand it in 2D and then we’ll see that things work in 3D).