CS777 Project 3

The idea of this project is to do a "mini" "research" project. Since there's only 4/5 weeks, you can't do much. The important part is for you to choose some area of computer animation, read some papers, and try something out.

For this project, you must:

Do a literature search and create a bibliography of the recent, relevant literature. You don't have to read all of the papers, but you should identify what you would need to read if you were doing this project for real.
As a special piece of this, you must look through the past 2 years of the proceedings of SCA (the symposium on computer animation) , and the past 3 years of SIGGRAPH and look to see what kinds of topics are even somewhat related to your project. (plus, you should dig deeper to find "all" papers directly related).
Read 4-5 papers on the topic and summarize them. I will help you identify 1-3 papers that are really important. You must pick at least 2 more.
Design and propose a small implementation project that will help you understand the topic. The idea is to implement a basic algorithm from a paper or perform some test to understand a method, not to develop some new thing. The key is to come up with something that you can actually do in 3 weeks!
Do the implementation project.
Present the topic to the class (your presentation should show off what you did for your implementation part, but also must serve as a tutorial for others in the class (so you should review the key points from the papers).

Some topic ideas:

Video textures
High-resolution matting
Rigid body dynamics and collisions
Mesh Morphing (ARAP and MAPS)
Animating hands
Fire and Explosions

The Deadlines and Milestones...

Monday, April 12: Project Proposals: You will meet with me (each group independently) and tell me what you want to do. We will work out a plan, and I will help you pick the initial papers.
Monday April 19: Project Plans: You will create a written plan, detailing what you are going to do for the project.
Monday April 26: Status Reports: We will have an in-class discussion of everyone's project
Monday-Friday, May 3-7: Project Presentations: Each group will give their presentation in class. Exact times to be scheduled
Monday, May 10: Final Projects Due: All written documentation must be placed on the web site.

What to turn in...

On or before 5pm, Monday May 10th, 2004: you should place into your handin directory (which is in /p/course/cs777-gleicher/public/html/P3):

A web page describing your project (that links to everything below). Please put each of the discussions as a seperate web page. Acrobat files are fine for everything except for the top-level page.
A zip file of the binaries of anything you built
A zip file of the source code of anything you built
Pictures of what you've done
Summaries of the papers that you've read, including a discussion of how the papers relate.
A discussion of what you actually got accomplished, and how hard it was to do. What would you have done differently? What would you do with an extra 3 weeks? What did you learn?
A discussion of how to make a CS777 project on the topic. Basically, suppose that I was going to assign a project on your topic next year. What should I assign? (be as specific as you can - pretend you were making the web page assigning the project. this is good practice for you if you think you might be a professor someday)

For Tuesday's presentation (1:30pm in 2310) you should:

Give an overview of the problem
Give a summary of the papers that you've read
Describe your project (what you've implemented)
Show stuff off

You should put all presentation materials (movies (encode with DiVX or Microsoft MPEG-4), power point, binaries, ...) into your web directory. Both to download them to my laptop as well as to leave them there for others to look at. They need to be there at 1pm on Tuesday.

You can bring your own laptop to give a presentation/demo. You may also use the computer in the 2310 podium, however, it is your responsibility to make sure things work. (beware - its a pretty slow computer, unless they've upgraded it recently). Or you can use my laptop.

I will be available in my office at 1pm so that you can copy things on to my laptop. You need to arrange to get the files on my laptop before the presentations.