Project 1 Intro and Topic

Project Requirements

1. An HTML "Topic" paper, under a page long, describes what you plan to do.  It's due on Thursday, Febrary 15
• Describe exactly what you're planning to accomplish.  A screenshot (which can be from a website or paper, as long as it's clearly referenced) might a good aid.  If the method is described in a book or website, a citation is very appropriate.
  
• The purpose is mostly for us to negotiate on the scope of the project, so for your own sake please be clear what you're building.
• Reference at least three similar projects or reference works you think will be useful.
2. An executable code draft due Tuesday, February 27 (just three weeks hence!).
• The code should compile and run.
• It should basically do what you're trying to do.
• It doesn't have to be pretty, or have all the features working yet.
  
3. A 15-minute in-class presentation on Tuesday, March 6th.  Show off your code, talk about your method, and so on.
   
4. The final version of your code is due after spring break on Tuesday, March 20th.  This version should be polished and pretty.
   

The project code is due Tuesday, February 27. Also turn it in on Blackboard.

Possible Topics (or pick your own!)

• Implement a walkthrough of a city model of reasonable size.  Must include at least textured ground, several multistory buildings, and some freestanding foliage.
• Draw a cool scene of your choice.  For example, a volume-rendered smoking volcano, a particle-system fireworks show, an animating "bullet-time" shot.
  
• Draw a pretty tree or other foliage or interesting 3D shape.
• Do something cool on the powerwall.  For example, build a way to tile large images in memory for fast display, or figure out how to hook the powerwall up to a dozen mice, etc.
  
• Do anything interesting with 3D models.  For example, read in a 3D model from a text file, squish the center of a 3D model by doing a nonlinear calculation on its coordinates, etc.
• Do anything interesting with textures.  For example, make up a 3D texture for some real surface, like tree bark.  Write a new and nice interface to read a 2D texture from a file.  Blend 2D textures on the CPU or GPU to create new textures.
  
• Implement any type of cellular automata (e.g., Conway's Game of Life).  These are fun to write on the graphics card using a pixel shader!
• Implement reaction-diffusion textures (of any type), on the graphics card or off.
• Implement any mesh simplification, subdivision, modification, or smoothing method, including Garland's Quadric Mesh Simplification, Lindstrom's Terrain Simplification, Taubin Smoothing, or any of the various subdivision schemes.  You can also find and call a library to do any of these, but be aware that this is often harder than just implementing the method yourself!
• Implement any interesting surface shader on the graphics card.  "Interesting" here could mean an anisotropic (e.g., velvet) shader, a fur shader, a nonphotorealistic (e.g., cartoon) shader, or a subsurface scattering shader.
• Implement or fake any form of global illumination: Radiosity, Jensen's Photon Maps, Precomputed Radiance Transfer, "Radiance"-style raytracing, or make up your own.
• Implement any flavor of raytracing: depth and hit-only raytracing on the graphics card, real multipath raytracing on the CPU, etc.
• Implement any interesting or reasonably useful non-graphics application on the graphics card.  For example, implement fluid dynamics, wavelet compression or decompression, Fourier transform, etc. on the graphics card.
• Implement display-time Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) on the graphics hardware using backface culling and the Z buffer.  You must use CSG to build and display at least one interesting (possibly hardcoded) object containing: at least one intersection or subtraction, and at least one union.  This actually isn't as hard as it sounds as long as the shape is hardcoded. (Google, Goldfeather's Algorithm Paper).
• Implement any flavor of quality shadows for a moving (possibly hardcoded) object.  We'll be looking at both shadow maps and shadow volumes, so those would be good choices.  Note that painfully fake shadows (e.g., the really easy shadows that are only cast onto a flat floor) are not acceptable.