Project 1 Deliverables and Grading

For the project due date (*) which is March 7th, you must deliver the following:

(*) - because of course late policies, there is a grace period for when you really have to get things done by.

I am also offering a bribe: if every one on your team fills out the "mid-semester evaluation" that I give you, you get an extra class day - which really means 2 weeks (e.g. your project will be due the Tuesday after break). In order to preserve anominity, do not put your name on the course evaluations.Instead, either put the evaluation in an envelope (and put your name on the envelope), or paper clip a piece of paper with your name on it, and give it to Andrew (the TA). He will keep count of who turns it in, pull off the names, and forward them to me.

I promoise that I will not try to "cheat" the process and figure out who said what. I really do care what you think about the class, and want you to be able to feel free to say what you think.

All files that get handed in must go into student course web page directories. ~cs838-1/public/html/Students/*

Each Team must:

  1. Make a Web Page describing their film. The web page should have full resolution stills, as well as, a "draft" rendering of the film. Each person's "personal" course page should link to this page.
  2. Links to each sub-group's page (which describe the plugins and other aspects of the assignments)

Each Group (e.g. pair of 2) must:

  1. Make a web page describing their plugin. This should include any documentation, of both how to use it as well as how it works. It should also provide a link to the source code (please put everything that someone would need to build/use your plugin online). The "standard of documentation" should be that.
  2. You must include the executable of your plug-in and at least one sample MEL script that uses it. (unless your plug-in is not used from MEL)
  3. Write up your experiences of using your teammates' plug-in. Describe the process of how they gave it to you (e.g. taught you to use it). Describe how their technical choices impacted your artistic choices. Ideally, as "client" you would have specified what you needed, and the developers would have provided this. Compare your experience with the ideal, both in terms of process and result. (e.g. what would you have asked for, and what could you have done with it).

You may choose to send #2 by email if you don't want your teammates to read it.

The Artifacts

A draft rendering of the movie can be small (320x240 or smaller), low framerate (15fps, maybe less if things move slowly), but should be good enough so that we can see what happens.

I want you to hand this in because it should take considerably less time to render and less space to store.It should also be sufficient to show off the technical part of the plug-in.

High resolution images should be 720 by 480, .9 pixel aspect ratio (e.g. they will look stretched when displayed on a "normal" computer monitor), and losslessly compressed. The odd size is because this is what Digital Video requires. You should take care to make your compositions "video safe" (that is, things that get close to the edge typically don't get displated on a TV). Remember that all is required for the first handin is a couple of stills at this resolution.

At some point, I hope to ask people to produce high resolution frames so we can write them to tape. If you do make high res frames (720x480 may take a long time to compute, 30 frames per second), I will get them written to tape for you. But please give me some warning.

Grading

We care about how "challenging" your implementation effort is. We will try to assess the technical content: making really fancy models or pretty textures is nice, but picking interesting technical things is more important. It's probably better to do a good job at something hard than a great job at something easy.

It is important that something works, and that you make animation with it. No working plugin, no animation -> bad grade.

It is important that we can understand your code and documentation. The goal should be that we can figure out what the code does and how it does it.

While we hope that you will choose to make a film that is artistically nice, we will try to not have artistic merit skew the grading process.

Documentation will be considered as part of a grade.