CS 426 Course Information

1996 Fall Semester

Syllabus

Schedule

Prerequisites

Required Text

Optional texts

Useful for the assignments:
These two books cost $35 and $38 respectively.

Supplemental texts:

Conferences and Journals text:

SIGGRAPH is the preeminent conference for work in computer graphics. The proceedings from these conferences are great resources. ACM Transactions on Graphics, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Visual Computer, are the most predominant journals.

Assignments

We will be using the facilities of MECA, the former ICGL for the programming assignments.

There will be 5 assignments. You will have 2 weeks to do each assignment. Initial assignments will be done alone; later you'll work with a partner. There will be a final project in the course that will be done in teams.

The projects we have in mind are:

0: Online Enrollment
Digitize a picture of yourself for the class Web page.
Due date: September 18.
1: Building a User Interface
A program to get you started with Graphics programming.
Due date: October 4.
2: An Image Enhancer
A series of exercises to introduce you to pixel based computing.
Due date: October 18.
3: Hierarchically Defined Objects and Collision Detection
A system to build and manipulate a collection of objects, perhaps a game.
Due date: November 8.
4: Recursively Defined Polyhedra and Fractal Mountains
A program to build beautiful fractal mountains.
Due date: November 22.
5: Ray Tracing
A simple ray tracer with one extension.
Due date: December 9.
Finally: Final project
A group project allowing further investigation of a topic of your choice.
Due date: January ??.

Grading

 Assignments will be graded during in-person sessions with one of the TAs. During the grading session, a TA will run the project to make sure that it conforms to the project guidelines. The TA will then quiz you about the structure of the code, the design trade-offs, and the implemented algorithms.

Note that you have to sign up for a grading session. No grading session = no grade. If you don't show up for your grading session, you'll have to make a new appointment, and one point will be subtracted from the final grade.

Assignment Turn-in & Late Policy

Assignments are due at 11.59PM on the due date. Late assignments are marked down in the same way as in CS461: in this way, an assignment which is only a few hours late doesn't get penalized that much. A late grade is computed as follows:
grade = original_grade * exp(-time_late/three_days)

Examples: work turned in five minutes late gets 99.9% credit, one hour late gets 98.6% credit, six hours late gets 92.0% credit, one day late gets 71.7% credit, three days late gets 36.8%, and one week late gets 9.7%.

Exceptions will be given only in extreme circumstances and only in advance.

The Honor Code applied to CS426

All work must be your own. You may discuss the assignments with your classmates but you must write your own code. If you borrow code from any source, be it Graphics Gems or somewhere on the web or a friend or..., you must state this in your assignment. Failure to do so will result in disciplinary action. If you have any question about what you can and cannot do, please contact Professor Dobkin.

Note that you will not receive any credit for borrowed code. So the best thing to do is to always write your own code.

CS 426 (Computer Graphics), CS Department, Princeton University
Last modified: Wed Sep 18 22:09:17 1996