15-505 and 60-414 Administrative Information for Spring 2003

Place and Time: Monday and Wednesday from 1:30 to 4:30
303 CFA for the inital meetings.

Instructor:

James Duesing

Email: jduesing@andrew.cmu.edu
Office: CFA 412, Phone: x8-7807
Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Jessica Hodgins

Email: jkh@cs.cmu.edu
Office: Newell-Simon Hall 4228B, Phone: x8-6795
Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Teaching Assistants:

Siobhan Rigg

Email: srigg@andrew.cmu.edu
Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Alla Safonova

Email: alla@cs.cmu.edu
Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Online Resources

The class web page is at

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jkh/aat

This is the primary online source for information about the course, including assignments, lecture notes, and administrative details.

There is an afs hierarchies for this class. Each registered student will get a subdirectory in

/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15505

named after your Andrew ID, to be used for electronic submission of assignments and to meet your class-related storage needs.

Prerequisites

15-462: Computer Graphics or
60-110 and 60-210: Electronic Media Studio I and II

Software

Maya Unlimited 4.5 in Wean 5336 running on 20 Linux boxes donated by Intel. Maya Unlimited includes fluid effects, cloth, fur, and match moving software.
Maya Complete 4.0 in CFA 317 running on Windows boxes. We hope that this software will shortly be upgraded to 4.5 but please note that files created with the extra functionality in Maya Unlimited can be corrupted by Maya Complete.
You can download the free Personal Learning Edition from here. Note: this version will NOT be adequate for all class assignments and we expect that you will need to do the majority of the class work in the clusters. There are also problems with compatability between the Learning Edition and other editions.

Required Text

Learning Maya 4.5 Alias|Wavefront. Available from the bookstore as well as amazon.com and other on-line sources.

Other Texts and Sources

Basic Commands for Unix
Literary Criticism
Art Criticism
Tips for working in teams from Randy Pausch
SIGGRAPH proceedings (in the E&S library)
SIGGRAPH Video Review: some of these as well as nice collection of other 3D animation videos and dvds are available for viewing in the video library at Hunt Library.

Grading Information

Grading for the class will be split up as follows:

Class Attendance 12%
Three Individual Assignments 11% each
Storyboard Pitch 5%
Final project 50%

Assignments and Projects

There will be two kinds of assignments: individual assignments at the start of the semester and a final project. The individual assignments will be completed by each student, the final project will be completed in teams of about eight students.

All assignments will be turned in as frames. The final project will begin as a storyboard, morph into an animatic and gradually become a complete animation with fully rendered frames and audio.

Grading on programming assignments is based the ambitiousness of what you attempted and the quality of the result. We will spend class time critiquing the animations and assignments. The notion of a critique may be unfamilar to some in the class. See the supplemental readings above more an introduction to the concept.

Late policy

Programming assignments should be turned in on the day they are due by midnight. We will look at the time stamp on your files to verify that they were turned in on time.

Late days: A total of three late days may be taken during the semester on the individual assignments. The flexibility provided by those late days is intended to get you through the time where all your classes just happen to have assignments due on the same day. If you absolutely need an extension beyond those three days, contact the instructors.

Jessica Hodgins