Lectures cover fundamental techniques of computer graphics such as 2D and 3D viewing, transformations, drawing lines and polygons, clipping and color to advanced techniques such as lighting, shadows, textures and shaders. OpenGL is used to illustrate implementation of these techniques.
Weekly assignments comprise a sequence of increasingly complex OpenGL programs that seeks to build practical experience using OpenGL. The final assignment is a course project which is an OpenGL program of the students choosing.
Assignments may be completed using a computer language and platform of the student's choice, although C or C++ on a Windows, OS/X or *NIX environment is preferred. CSEL is available to computer science majors to complete the assignments and for testing.
Assignments will be graded on a GNU/Linux system. Programs should contain #ifdef statements to facilitate compilation on this system. Students using exotic programming languages will be expected to aid the instructor in setting up a suitable environment for grading the assignments.
Assignments must be submitted via moodle. Assignments are due at 11:59pm on the due date. The grace period for all assignments is until 06:30 am the next day. Late assignments will not be accepted unless previously arranged.
CATAE students are encouraged to submit assignments on the same schedule as on campus students, but special accomodations will be made on an individual basis.
Potential projects would be a scientific visualization application, a game or any application with a heavy graphical emphasis. Students are encouraged to develop an application that is useful in some other aspect of their studies or work. To accommodate this students are given wide latitude in terms of platform and language of implementation. However, in order to facilitate grading, this should be done in coordination with the instructor.
Students are encouraged to do an oral presentation of their project during class near the end of the semester. The oral presentation is optional.
Each assignment should reflect each student's individual work. However, code reuse is permitted, including example code from the class as well as code from resources on the web. A "safe harbor" in this regard is simply a comment indicating where code from another source is reused.