MONASH UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
HONOURS YEAR, COMPUTER SCIENCE

Penrose machines (from Sci. American)

FIT4012 : Procedural modelling, animation & artificial life in computer graphics

Course outline

Lecturer: Alan Dorin
- Office: CEMA lab, rm 144 (first floor, South wing) bldg. 63
- Phone: ext. 5-3576, email: alan.dorin-at-infotech.monash.edu.au
- Consultation: Anytime convenient, by appointment please!

Lectures

Lecture notes: HTML format
Lecture times: Thursday, 2:00 - 4:00pm, rm 145, bldg. 63, Home page: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~cema/courses/FIT4012/index.html

Course Aims and Objectives

This unit covers the procedural specification of models for animation, their basic movements and high-level behaviour. Various means of giving Artificial Life to what are essentially sets of numbers are examined. These are utilized in an assignment which provides practical experience in the production of models for computer animation, as well as in the rendering of these models.

Successful completion of the course will give the student the necessary skills to undertake further research topics in computer graphics and artificial life.

Assessment

The unit assessment consists of 1 assignment worth 100% of the marks for the unit.
There is no written examination.
Assignment 2009: Gormenghast or The Alpine Tour.
Due date : 12 noon, Friday 29 May, 2009
Hall of Fame : Assignments submitted by previous students
Assignment 2008: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon or The Motorpace.
Assignment 2007: The Lost City of Atlantis or The Great Race.
Assignment 2006: The Australian Landscape.

While you may discuss solutions with your colleagues, your submitted assignment must be your own work - do not copy assignments from other students. Students detected doing this will be subject to disciplinary action in accordance with the faculty or university regulations.

Assignments are to be submitted electronically on or before the due date and time. There is a penalty for late submission. See the assignment link for details.

Your assignment should run in a standard UNIX environment (there are numerous types in the school), using OpenGL / GLUT for graphics. The submission of material which requires Microsoft products to operate is unacceptable.

Reading Material

There is no prescribed text for this course, but there are a number of recommended books. References are given throughout the lecture notes. Below are some graphics-specific texts that are worth reading...

Recommended Reading:

Watt, A & M Watt (1992),
Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques: theory and practice
ACM Press, New York NY. [Amazon ref]

Terzopoulos, D., (1999),
Artificial Life For Computer Graphics,
in Communications of the ACM, Vol 42, No. 8, p32-42
[ACM Link] This article provides a good introduction to the application of Artificial Life to Computer Graphics.

Reference:

OpenGL Architecure Review Board / Dave Shreiner, Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, Tom Davis (2005),
OpenGL Programming Guide, Version 2 (5th edition)
Addison-Wesley. [Amazon ref]

last updated: June 26, 2009.