The week 11 CGI lab is finally ready.
Assignment 2 can be submitted up to one week late (end of week 12) without penalty.
Both Assignment 1 and 2 can be submitted up to the end of teaching (week 13) for a pass mark only.
You can skip the week 11 and 12 lectures and still be able to pass the course. I'd prefer you to attend, but if you really need to spend more time on your other studies, do so.
pfpy3d has been installed in /usr/local/bin for the N111 lab.
Assignment 1: DON'T PANIC. If you are really struggling with the programming, remember that assignments can be resubmitted (for a pass mark only) up to the end of the last week of teaching. You can just show me what you've done so far next week.
I will accept assignment demonstrations on Friday 22nd as well as the regular Wednesday/Thursday lab sessions.
Ephebe has moved to new IP address 150.203.24.23. You can ignore the warnings from ssh or scp about the remote host changing.
The mid semester test is open book, short question and answer format. Topics may include anything we've done in lectures and lab exercises. There are some sample questions in the Hints section.
The Aliens dropship for Assignment 1 is supposed to have length 25.18m, span 12.59m (15.3m with pods unfolded) and height 6.05m. Feel free to round those numbers off to more convenient values.
Reference drawings for the lunar lander or Aliens dropship can be collected from my office.
Official change to Assignment 1: in the extra marks list of the requirements for distinction level, replace
A command that lowers a ramp and starts a short animation of a Rover (simulation) or armoured personnel carrier (game) driving off onto the surface.with
A command that lowers unfolding landing gear and a ramp.
Added new Hints page for __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK and other bits of information.
Thanks to a lot of work by Bob Edwards, the N111 PCs now have hardware acceleration for 3D and the C/Java libraries for computer graphics lab exercises and assignment. Python 3D: not yet
To compile Java programs with JOGL in N111,
$ setenv CLASSPATH ".:/usr/local/java/jre/lib/jogl.jar"
To check that the OS has been upgraded, type glxinfo and look for "nvidia" as the OpenGL renderer string.
Final version of assignment 1.
There is online documentation (within ANU only) for JOGL and GLUT.
Textbooks have arrived at the bookshop. (They may not be on the shelves, but they are in stock if you ask.)
More lecture notes and labs.
There is a geometry exercise for you to do. This will be handed out at the Wednesday lecture.
Lecture notes and lab exercise for week 2.
If you want to do Computer Graphics but don't think you have the maths background, talk to me. It helps a bit if you've already done 3D coordinate geometry and vector/matrix maths, but it is not essential as this is not a mathematics-heavy course. Quite often the process is reversed: after doing computer graphics, you'll want to learn more maths. I will almost always sign the exemption form for students who don't have the maths prerequisite but really want to do the course
You must, repeat must, be a fluent programmer to do this course. If you can't write C/Java code, or learn to do so very quickly, you will fail.
I am much more inflexible about this. You will spend a lot of time in this course writing small programs and compiling them, with a plain text editor and command line. If you can't do this, you won't learn enough, and will fail both the assignments and the exams.
If you don't have direct C/Java and Linux experience, you may be able to do computer graphics anyway. The first four or five weeks have very little actual programming, which is intended to allow students with experience in other languages or platforms time to adapt to the systems used here. If you are fluent in C, C#, Java, Objective-C, Modula-2, Ada, Python, or Lisp, you should be able to do Computer Graphics. If you only have experience in Visual Basic, Visual Forms Designer, PHP, Perl, or Javascript, you will not.