COSC455 Assessable assignment 2

This assignment is worth 15% of the marks in Paper COSC455.

1. Propose a topic of your choosing, similar in style to the example topics below.
2. Have your topic approved. Topic areas will be approved on a first-come first-served basis and each of you must choose a different one.
3. Read carefully any given paper or papers for your topic. Identify further reading necessary.
4. Write a report that describes the work you have studied. The report should be four to eight typed pages. Identify any faults or problems with the work. Comment on its importance in Computer Graphics. Implementation work is neither required nor recommended.

How to get high marks

You must identify the weaknesses or limitations of what is described in your source material as well as show that you have understood it.

Keep your writing simple. Avoid repetition. Plan your report so that you develop the ideas in a logical sequence.

Don't write too much. You can earn full marks with a four page report. If you go over eight pages, then you are not writing concisely or you are giving too much detail.

Cite your references properly. I have to know what papers you are discussing or criticising.

Get help with proof-reading. Word processors make beautiful looking essays but they don't check the ideas or your writing. You tend to lose marks for saying the opposite of what you mean.

Use figures and illustrations. This is a graphics paper.

Assignment 2 Example Essay topics

1. Explain the problem of bias in non-uniform sampling. Describe the areas of computer graphics that use or might benefit from non-uniform sampling. What solutions have been suggested? What problems remain.
2. Photographic realism is often quoted as an objective for computer graphics. Yet most "realistic" computer-generated pictures can be distinguished fairly easily from photographs of real scenes. What aspects of real scenes make this imitation so difficult? What progress has been make in the last ten years?
3. In 1990, Saito and Takahashi drew attention away from the trend to ever increasing "realism" in computer graphics. By suggesting that pictures should communicate and be comprehensible, they set a new trend. How has the subject of comprehensible rendering developed since then?
4. To what extent does Kajiya's rendering equation describe all about lighting? Can we get all the effects implied by the rendering equation? Can we get more?
5. Particle systems were introduced by Reeves in 1983 to model smoke and fire. Investigate the ways that this idea has been developed since then. What will particle systems not do?
6. 3D character animation has found a niche in such productions as "Toy Story". But the hand-drawn characters still seem to dominate in entertainment animation. Why is this? If 3D models are not to replace hand animation, in what other ways will the computer serve the animation industry?
7. In film making, one of the most important jobs is that of the cameraman. How is the art of camera control represented in the computer animation literature?
8. Cubic spline curves and patches have considerable competition from implicit methods, polyhedral smoothing, and deformation techniques. Explain their continued popularity. Is it justified?
9. The simple objects of engineering have proved much easier to model than natural objects such as clouds, rivers and seashells. Describe the progress of natural modelling over the last fifteen years.
10. Image based rendering techniques have created a major area of development. Is this a temporary state of affairs until machines get fast enough to do everything with 3D models, or are there good reasons why image-based methods will be with us for a long time?