Welcome to computer graphics 15
462-662 at Carnegie Mellon University
I'm Keenan Crane, I'm a professor of
computer science and robotics
and I also do research in computer
graphics so specifically
in the area of geometric algorithms. The
purpose of this video
is to give you all the information that
you'll need to succeed
this semester, so periodically we'll
upload little videos
to cover administrative things, to talk
about what's been going on this week,
and to answer any significant questions
that have come up.
I should also say that all the
information today is available on the
course webpage at
15462.courses.cs.cmu.edu
so please go ahead check out that link.
Read through especially the course info
page in detail because
there's a lot of things that I won't say
here in this video but that are
important for you to know
as you go through the course. I should
also say we have a
great set of TAs this semester, so if you
have any questions
please at any time feel free to email
them, email me, post a question on
piazza, whatever you like to do, but don't
be shy about getting in touch.
The first things you should do to get
running with the course is
to sign up for Piazza so go to
piazza.com/cmu,
find our course 462, and sign up.
And second, to sign up for an account on
the course webpage,
click on the login button in the
upper right
and you should see a link that says "sign
up". To sign up
you will need a special passcode which
is available only on
Piazza, so you'd better sign up for
Piazza first,
before you sign up for the course web
page. I should also say
if you're not officially enrolled in
this course yet
don't worry. First of all usually there's
no trouble
getting in: we don't really have much of
a class
size limitation this semester. Just sign
up for the webpage,
get rolling, start reading through the
assignments and so forth, so that if you
do decide to add the course
you're on track. So we will be running
the whole course remotely
and it basically has three components. We
have lectures, we have recitations,
and we have office hours, which will all
be done online.
The recitations and the office hours
will be
done through Zoom, and you'll be able to
find the appropriate zoom links
on piazza. The lectures will be
pre-recorded videos that you can watch
on YouTube, but we will be there during
the lecture period to answer
questions that might come up while you
watch these videos. So if you're watching
the video, something doesn't make sense,
just hit pause, go to the Zoom room,
talk to us, ask us questions, and then go
back to your video.
A couple of tips. It can be really hard I
know when you're sitting at home to pay
attention to a long
80-minute lecture video, so a couple of
things that our students have found
are useful. One is to simply speed up the
video, which you can do using YouTube. So
if you've never done that before you can
give that a try right now.
Go to the bottom right, you should see a
little gear icon and you'll see a little
option for playback speed.
So you can speed up the video as fast as
you can, as fast as you can take it.
The other thing that can be very helpful
is to just break up
watching the video into chunks. So if
it's 80 minutes long,
maybe you break it up into 40 minutes
today, and 40 minutes tomorrow. That can
really help to
to keep focused. In terms of work that
you'll have to do for this course
they're really
just three main things. There are mini
homeworks, so this is just two or three
questions that we're going to ask
after each lecture to just make sure
that you understand what's going on.
Then there's four major coding
assignments. So over the course of the
semester
you're going to build up a 3D package
called Scotty3D
and Scotty3D is just like any modern 3D
package: it has
modeling, it has rendering, it has
animation, but the difference is
all of the key routines have been
stripped out and you're gonna
go ahead and fill them in and hopefully
be able to create some really cool
uh content; really cool models and
animations. And finally we will have
a midterm and a final, but please do not
sweat about this. Each of these is worth
only 10 percent
of your grade. This is mainly just a
checkpoint to make sure that you
understand
conceptually what's going on in the
course, not just the
coding. Also please be aware that you
have
five late days which you can use
completely at your discretion. You don't
have to ask
us, "can I use it for this or that"; just go
ahead and use it.
In terms of collaboration we encourage
people to
talk to their peers, to have interesting
conversations on piazza, to come to
office hours and ask whatever you like,
but your final work must be your own. All
assignments in this class will be
individual work. All the details
again you can find on the webpage about
collaboration and cheating and so forth.
Okay that's it! So if you have questions
please don't hesitate to reach out and
contact
us on Piazza on email whatever you like.
Otherwise if you're excited about
getting rolling you can start watching
the first lecture
right away. So just go to the course
webpage, you'll see our course schedule,
and you can just click on the video
links to get started.
So that's it-looking forward to seeing
you this semester.
