15-464 Assignments

Initial Assignment

Programming Assignments

This course will involve two programming assignments and a final project of your own design. More info on the first two assignments will appear here when they are ready to go out.

• MiniProject 1: Traditional Animation
• MiniProject 2: Simulation

Please make sure that the TA and the instructor know if you choose to do any group projects.

Part of the deliverable for each assignment is a report, which can consist of a presentation or a web site. In your report you should cover the following:

• Goals. What were you trying to achieve in the animations you created?
• Techniques. What approaches did you use? There is no need to review material that was required for the project, but briefly describe extensions beyond the required aspects of the animation, portions of the assignment you decided to do differently, tips and tricks that you uncovered / invented along the way, etc. Another way to think of it is that you should (briefly) discuss any aspects of the technical design and implementation of the project that you think would be interesting to the rest of the class.
• Results. Show and discuss the animations you created.
• Observations. This is the space for your own thoughts on the project. Were there aspects of the project that you found especially easy or difficult? If you worked with both motion captured and keyframed data, what differences were there in trying to achieve certain effects? What would you do differently next time? What more would you do if you had more time to work on the project? What did you like and not like about it? You don't have to answer all of these questions, of course, but they are just to get you started thinking about what to say here.

Paper Presentation

In addition to the projects, you will be required to present one recent research paper during the course of the semester. You will have 10 minutes for your presentation. You may bring your own laptop or coordinate with the TA to borrow a laptop for the presentation. In your presentatation, please cover the following points. In general, you should be able to do this with just 4-8 slides. You will be asked to turn in your presentation material in the same manner in which you turn in your programming assignments.

• Introduction / Motivation. What are the authors trying to do and why is it interesting and important?
• Techniques. Very briefly describe how the authors tackle this problem.
• Results. Show the results. Often, this section will amount to showing the video provided by the authors. Be careful in timing your presentation, because if you show the entire video, this may take up to half of your 10 minutes. You may choose to let the authors describe the results in their own words or turn off the sound and narrate yourself to make specific points.
• Discussion. In this section you should give your own opinion based on your study of the paper. Be sure to leave at least a minute or two for this section. Here are some questions to think about. Are the authors trying to solve an interesting problem in the first place? How good a job did they do? Are the results useful? To whom? What would we learn if we were to read this paper in detail? What might you change or how might you solve this problem in a better way? Where do you expect the field to go from here, i.e., what important problems didn't the authors solve? Don't limit yourself to these questions -- just use them as a starting point to organize your own thoughts about the paper.

Final Projects

• Final Project Guidelines