When: Tuesday/Thursday 3:00 - 4:50 pm
Where: CFA 266
Instructor: Dave Pape
e-mail: depape@buffalo.edu
Office: CFA 287
Office hours: Tues/Wed 1-2
Website: http://resumbrae.com/ub/dms439/
This course is designed for students with graphics programming experience and/or experience with 3D modeling packages. Teams of modelers and programmers will collaborate to build immersive virtual reality art experiences over the course of 2 semesters. The course introduces students to Ygdrasil, a high-level VR authoring toolkit and Performer a graphics library. Ygdrasil handles a number of activities common to VR environments, such as assembling 3D models into a world, collision detection, navigation, and detecting events and passing messages in response to them. Modellers will face the challenge of modeling for a real time environment. Prerequisites are graphics programming (DMS 423 or equivalent) or experience with 3D modeling packages.
Books/websites that may be of interest:
Real-Time Rendering, Tomas Moeller, Eric Haines; http://realtimerendering.com/
You are allowed up to two free absences; after that, each absence will cost you 2% of your overall grade.
The semester project may be an individual or team project; I will expect more from a large team than from an individual. All members of a team are to contribute significantly to the project. The project should be, as much as possible, the work of only the student or students involved; any code or content from outside sources should be clearly documented.
In the beginning of the semester, I will be assigning everyone small tasks to help build a common virtual environment. This will be intended to give everyone experience working with the VR system, before starting on your semester projects (although you can start working on them right away, if you wish).
Other than the project & assignments, the major thing that we'll be doing this semester is reading articles related to VR, and discussing them. I expect to assign about 1 article per week. Most, if not all, of these will be available through the UB Library's subscription to the ACM and IEEE digital libraries.
I will send any e-mail relating to this course to your official buffalo.edu address. Be sure that you check this address. Do not ask me to send e-mail to another address instead - if you don't want to use the buffalo.edu mail system, forward your mail from there to whatever system you do use.
Also, be warned that mail from free services like Hotmail or Yahoo has a strong chance of being caught by spam filters. Hence, I recommend not sending me e-mail from such an address, if you want to be certain that I'll receive it.
As of the Fall 2003 semester, all DMS production courses now carry a lab fee of $100 per course.
If you have a disability (physical, learning or psychological) which may make it difficult for you to carry out the course work as outlined, and/or requires accomodations such as recruiting note takers, readers, or extended time on exams and assignments, please contact the Office of Disability Services, 25 Capen Hall, 645-2608, and also your instructor during the first two weeks of class. ODS will provide you with information and will review appropriate arrangements for reasonable accomodations.
Plagiarism is literary theft and a betrayal of trust. The term is derived from the Latin word for kidnapper and refers to the act of signing one's own name to words, phrases, or ideas which are the literary property of another. Plagiarism comes in many forms, all to be avoided: outright copying, or paraphrase, or a mosaic or disguised use of words and phrases from an unacknowledged source. To avoid plagiarism, make it your habit to put quotation marks around words and phrases, or to isolate and indent longer passages, that you are using from someone else's writing. And be sure to cite the source, in a footnote or endnote, or within parentheses in your text. The penalties for plagiarism can be severe: from an F for the particular assignment, to an F for the course, to referral of the case to the Dean of Undergraduate Education for administrative judgment. If you are unsure about how to use and document sources, please consult with your instructor.
If you are planning a student production which involves using any prop which could be interpreted to be a weapon [toy gun, BB gun, knife, etc.] and you are planning to shoot on the UB campus or any other public place, you must obtain written permission from Campus Security or the equivalent authority before you shoot. If you do not, you will face serious problems including possible expulsion from the university.