Hi there Graphics!
I have what I hope is good news for most people in the course. The main bulk of marks have now been released on WebCMS with myUNSW submitted (but usually not immediately reflected).
There are still some students with longer extensions unmarked and other marks queries and technical issues being resolved, but for the majority of you, this will be the last notice you'll be hearing from me or the course.
Thank you for taking the course and also thanks for all the useful feedback you've given us via the MyExperience survey.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
You may have noticed that sometime this morning when the initial email of marks was released that Graphics was marked as LE (which means Late Entry). It was indeed late, as the tutors are still marking some of the assignments, especially those with extensions.
We are, however, on schedule to release about 80% of the course's marks at 12pm today (16th December).
You may notice that your marks don't exactly match up to the raw marks you've recieved in the course. Assignment 3 was actually scaled up due to its difficulty (apologies again for this, there will be a lot of redesign that goes into this for next year). When we release the exact marks in webcms, you'll still receive exact feedback for what you've submitted in the assignment, but your final mark may appear slightly higher than that.
Marc
Hi Graphics!
I definitely wasn't expecting to make a Week 12 notice, but here we are! What we have on:
Assignment 2 Results Released
This evening we released the results for Assignment 2. You should be able to access them via your Grades link .
Extra Mid-Week Help Session
We've scheduled an extra Help Session for this week on Wednesday, 3-6pm. There's only one tutor (Sam) available for this one, so please thank him for being able to give some extra help if you see him.
Assignment 3 due at the end of this week
A reminder that the final assignment is due on the 3rd December. If you're having trouble meeting this deadline due to exam pressure/scheduling, remember that you can email the course's email address to apply for an extension.
Otherwise, we hope that you're able to make progress on the assignment so far!
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi all!
Just a reminder that the MyExperience survey will be closing at midnight tonight (Thursday the 25th). If you haven't responded yet, please do, it helps a lot for feedback about how we've taught the course and how we can improve it for the future.
You should be able to access the survey via https://myexperience.unsw.edu.au/ or via a link in Moodle.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
Thanks so much to the students who took part in the survey over the last few days. It's a tough thing to do to realise that you've made some mistakes in assignment design, but thank you for those who reached out and gave me a chance to gather some information and do a redesign with enough time for people to benefit from the changes.
What's happening and the rationale
I'm releasing a changed Assignment Specification for Assignment 3, taking into account the overwhelming feedback that the third assignment was . . . overwhelming. Changes have been made to hopefully do two things:
By the time you receive this notice, the Google Document specification will have changed, but the merge request of the new files in the git repo (Readme and Justification) will not have gone out yet. They will happen in the next few days.
The changes in detail:
Thanks for taking this journey through Graphics with us and I apologise that things were a bit bumpy here at the end. I'm hoping these changes will ease the pressure of the third assignment and give people a chance to approach it with a little more hope.
Marc
Hi Graphics!
We've received some feedback about Assignment 3 in particular, but it also has some meaning for the previous assignments in the course. Given the possibility that a lot of people are feeling like Assignment 3 is too difficult, I decided to make a poll to see what a larger number of people are thinking and also explain the options available.
Here's the Assignment 3 survey: https://forms.office.com/r/aFyRutLebD
It asks a series of questions about the difficulty curve of the assessments in the course and also outlines some possible changes we can still make to Assignment 3 if enough people are interested. There are potential ramifications to these changes, including changing the perceived workload of the assignment as well as changing whether a student can predict their final outcome from the current marks awarded. It's unlikely that final marks will be affected by any of these changes, but it might make changes to how students will approach Assignment 3.
Please fill out the survey as soon as you can. If any changes need to be made to the assignment, they need to happen very soon (probably by Monday next week). If we do make changes, we'll try to cause minimal disruption to any plans or implementation that has been started for the assignment.
Thanks for your attention!
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
We're nearly at the end of Graphics now, with our last week of classes for this term. We have a few things to talk about today:
Assignment 2
The deadline for Assignment 2 has passed, but there's still some time left to earn marks (especially if you already have an extension). Marking for the initial submissions will be starting once the late penalty period finishes and we're expecting to be able to release marks mid to late next week.
Assignment 3
Assignment 3 Specification has been released and can be found in the Assignments Section of the course website. Remember that the specification is restricted to students only, so you'll need to log in to the website to see it. The repository for the assignment will be released in the next few days.
This assignment has a due date in the exam period, which can be extremely busy for some students. Do not hesitate to reach out to us via the course email address if you need to reschedule your due date because of exam pressure.
MyExperience
In case you didn't know, UNSW has a regular course survey for every course called MyExperience. This is usually accessed via myexperience.unsw.edu.au or the Moodle page for this course. We're at about 10% response rate at the moment, but we'd really love to get more responses from you so that we have a good idea about how the course has gone and what you think about it.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Everyone!
We're at the start of Week 9, which means there isn't much course left in Graphics for this term! We have a few things to talk about today:
Assignment 2
A reminder to everyone that the due date for Assignment 2 is this Friday the 12th November at 8pm. If you haven't made a start yet, now's the time! If you need any last minute help, we'll be running our usual Help Session on Friday afternoon.
Assignment 3
We're hoping to get the Specification for Assignment released this weekend or early next week. I was originally looking at a Week 11 due date, but I realised that was quite a tight turnaround and am looking to make the due date for this assignment later while still allowing the tutors time to mark everything and submit it to CSE. At the moment the tentative (and likely) due date is the 3rd December.
MyExperience
You may have noticed that MyExperience surveys are now available! You can access the survey via Moodle. Please fill out the survey when you have time, they're quite helpful for us in improving the course in the future. As you might already know, this is a rewrite of the course, so it's reasonably similar to running a course for the first time and any feedback you have will be very helpful.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
After delivering the lectures on Lighting, I was thinking about changing the requirements in the second assignment regarding multiple lights.
So the change that has been made is to part 3d. Multiple Lights . Instead of requiring multiple directional lights and multiple point lights, this requirement now only require multiple point lights. This change is in line with how lighting is more often done in a realistic scene with one directional light and many point lights. No marks will be deducted from any assignment that has implemented multiple directional lights, so if you have already finished, this change will not affect you in a negative way.
The actual text change is:
Old text:
"There must be a minimum of 2 of each of directional and point lights to score marks in this section."
New text:
"There must be a minimum of 2 point lights to score marks in this section."
If you would like the Readme.md file in your repository to reflect this text change, you will need to accept a merge request which will go out later today.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi there Graphics!
We're up to Week 8 now, which means we're getting to the final topics that we're going to cover in the course. We don't have much we need to talk about today other than:
Where we are in Graphics
We've now covered the basics of Rendering, Geometry and Lighting, so we're going to start looking at interesting special effects and the techniques necessary to make them work. We do have one major technique which we'll start covering next week, which is the idea of rendering more than once per frame . . . but we'll show you how we use that when we get there.
Assignment 2
Assignment 2 might be at some level of progress for you, but bear in mind that there are still some topics we're covering this week that you'll need if you're looking to get maximum marks for using maps with your lighting. If you haven't looked into the assignment yet, I'd suggest at least cloning the repo and getting your basic setup going even if you don't have time to work on it yet.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hello all!
We're back after our Flexibility Week and are back to our normal lessons this week.
Classes are back on
This week, Lectures and Tutorials are back on at their usual times. We're starting a new series of lessons on Lighting to bring you back from your break and show you one of the most important ways to make 3D objects believeable.
Assignment 2 has been released
In case you missed the previous notices, the specification for Assignment 2 has been released and you should have a git repo already available for it. The specification is in the Assignments Section of the course website.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics,
We've noticed that some people did not fill out any documentation for Assignment 1, and (as is stated in the specification) received zero marks for the assignment.
As we're trying not to be too harsh at the moment, I've decided to give people a second chance to submit documentation. So if you received no marks for Assignment 1 because of a lack of documentation, I'm going to ask the tutors to remark your assignments, but with some conditions.
If this is you:
As I don't want the tutors to get bogged down in remarking, this offer is only available until Friday 29th October. It is also only available if you're in the situation where you have written code for the assignment but forgot to document it.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
We have some news today in regards to Assignments
Assignment 1 Marks
We've finished marking the majority of Assignment 1 and it is now available for you to see your feedback and marks. You can access this via the grades button when you're logged into the course website (this link might work, but I'm not 100% on it: https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3421/21T3/user... )
If there are any issues with the marking or anything you need to discuss, you can contact your tutor or if you'd like to talk to me about it (assume there will be delays if you're contacting me) you can email the class email address (cs3421@cse ... ).
Assignment 2 Released
Assignment 2 is now ready for you to start work. This assignment is based on 3D graphics and lighting. The specification document can be accessed via the course website in the Assignments section. Remember that you need to be logged in as a student to be able to see the link to the document.
We will also be pushing a git repository to each of you for you to work and submit from. This is very similar to how it worked for Assignment 1.
Bear in mind that we haven't taught you everything that you'll need to be able to complete this assignment, but you will definitely be able to make a start on it then continue your work as we go through lighting in the coming weeks.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
Just a quick notice to remind everyone that week 6 is "Flexibility Week". This means there are no Lectures and Tutorials this week and no assessable content will be due this week. We do have some things to talk about though:
Week 6 Activities
There are no lectures or tutorials in Week 6. You can use this time to catch up on previous work in the course or look at some of the extension exercises in the tutorials.
If I (Marc) decide to do something informal this week like some streaming and discussion of Graphics in games and film, I'll let you know later.
Assignment 1 Marks Release
Coming very soon! The team has nearly finished all the marking so we're expecting a class-wide marks release on Monday or Tuesday, barring any unforseen issues.
Assignment 2 Specification Release
Like the Assignment 1 marking, the Specification document for Assignment 2 is being written at the moment and should be ready for release in the next two days. We'll also have a git repository for each student, much like Assignment 1. Bear in mind that at the time of release, we won't have taught you all the course material necessary to actually complete this assignment, so you can be patient, start looking into it, but there's no pressure to complete it before the Lighting lectures and tutorials.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hello Graphics!
Now that Assignment 1 is nearly finished for everyone and ready for marking, we'd like to collect some information from you about how it went. We've tried a few interesting things in this assignment like a subjective mark as well as documentation writing for marking (and a bit of self assessment). We'd like to hear what you think of these features and whether they worked for you.
Here's a link to the survey:
https://forms.office.com/r/8EhinU8TZC
Please fill it out as soon as you can (preferably before mid week 5) so that we can take your feedback into account for the design of Assignment 2.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
EDIT: I should have said that this survey only works for you as UNSW students, so you'll have to login to fill it out.
Hello all!
Welcome to Week 4 of Graphics. We have a few logistical things to talk about today:
Public Holiday 4th October
Here in Sydney on the 4th October, we'll be having a Public Holiday, so our normal Monday afternoon lecture will not be happening. We're still planning on giving you some content to learn, so we're going to be having the lecture on Tuesday at 4pm instead. Attendance is optional for this lecture, you can think of it more like a live taping of a recorded lecture.
Daylight Savings Time Changes
If you are not currently in Sydney, this will potentially affect when your classes are for this course. Sydney has moved to AEDT, which means our clocks have moved forward an hour. If you are not in NSW, Australia, this might mean the lectures and tutorials will happen an hour earlier than they were in the previous weeks.
Assignment 1 due date has passed
For everyone who has finished the Assignment, Congratulations and we hope you've learnt something useful from your efforts. If you haven't finished yet, don't give up, there are still marks to get while we're in the late penalty stage. We won't start marking until after the late penalty and extension submissions are in, so we're hoping you'll get your marks back around the end of week 5 or a bit later than that.
In the background we're about to start work on the next assignment, but that will be done after we've collected some feedback on the first assignment and see what people think of the format.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hi Graphics!
Just wanted to remind everyone that Assignment 1 is due today. This notice has some information about how we're handling your submissions:
Adjusted Assignment Due Date
We've noticed that our scheduled Help Session was going to be happening at the same time as the Assignment due date, which was a little awkward. To make sure that anyone getting help during the 1st October Help Session has time to make use of it, we've pushed the Assignment 1 due date back to 8pm.
How to Submit
As you've been working in your own repository for the Assignment, we will be marking the final commit you make to the repository. If your final commit is after the due date, we'll apply the late penalty to the assignment. If you have accidentally made a late commit and you need us to mark a previous submission, you can email your tutor to let them know exactly which commit should be marked. Only one version of your assignment will be marked.
What to include in your submission
Documentation
Remember that you must include your documentation with the submission.
IMPORTANT:
You will be marked based on what you have documented in the "JUSTIFICATION.md" document. If you have implemented some parts of the assignment, but not documented them, you will receive no marks for those portions of the assignment.
You can think of it like this: Your "JUSTIFICATION.md" is the file that is being marked. Your running application and code are only used to justify the marks given in the document.
Textures (and other files)
Remember that any textures that you have used in your assignment must be pushed to the repo also. If you submit an assignment with a link to a file location on your local computer, your application won't be able to run on anyone else's computer.
Operating System
In case of any issues with our testing, could you please also include which Operating System you used to create your assignment. Adding information in the "JUSTIFICATION.md" file will help us in case your application doesn't run on all operating systems. We're not going to be harsh on if your application doesn't run on all OSes, so long as we can run it on at least one of our testing environments.
We hope everyone's enjoying getting into Graphics so far and we look forward to seeing what you've created!
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Heya Graphics Students!
A quick notice to let you know that we've managed to organise our Help Sessions and will be starting with the first one this afternoon. Apologies for the late notice, but if you're around and in need of help, we will have some tutors available this afternoon.
Help Sessions will be running weekly on Fridays between 3-6pm and they will be in a Zoom channel: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/87010000268
This information is also now on the Course Website at the Help Sessions link (you need to be signed in as a student to see it).
We will have the capability to break out into smaller groups for specific topics or one on one rooms for debugging help.
Hope everyone's enjoying the course so far and getting started on Assignment 1.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hello All!
First off, I want to thank the tutors for their hard work putting together new course infrastructure with a very limited leadup time this term. They've been working very hard ironing out the infrastructure issues we've been having trying to make sure that our Assignment structure supports multiple operating systems as well as a few hundred individual students' work.
Here's some information about the changes we've made since Assignment 1 released:
Due to the problem people were having with git submodules, the growing size of the repos and also problems in automation between Mac/Windows/Linux and VS code/Clion, we have created an improved build system. To download the dependencies, we have created a shell script called fetch_deps.sh and a powershell script (for windows) by the same name that:
The starter repo, ( Opengl Cmake Setup ) now has updated instructions on this new build system.
Tutorial code is now using the same system. In addition, having one big repo for all the tutorials was becoming unwieldy, so there is now a folder at: https://gitlab.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3421/21T3/tutorials which has links to all the individual tutorials. Remember though, that you have your own copy of these tutorials in your own repo that you can work on.
Additional Practice
repositories are also available (called "opengl_practice"). These will be pushed to your repos on a weekly basis and have extra exercises and work that you can try out that extends the tutorials.
In your Repos
We've pushed these changes out to all students' repos (where possible). For those of you that this wasn't possible, you will have received a merge request that you'll have to manually accept to receive the updated project(s).
Thanks for working with us!
Apologies that things aren't 100% smooth and we're still working out how our infrastructure should work for this course, but hopefully, things will be working quite well for the next two assignments. If you were looking for a "Games" course and the experience it entails, you've got it right here . . . it's a bit wobbly on release, gets patched a lot early, but turns out awesome later (we hope). Having said that, if you have any feedback or need help on working with the new infrastructure, please get in touch with us via the Course Forum or Discord .
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hello all!
Welcome to the second week of Graphics. A few things are in motion at the moment:
Assignment 1
Some of you may have noticed that we released the preliminary text and git repo for Assignment 1 yesterday (Saturday). You can see this information in the Assignment 1 section of the course website. A reminder that you need to be logged in as a student to be able to see this information.
We're currently working on the git infrastructure for this, we've noticed already that there's an issue with the project when using VS Code in Windows, but that should be fixed by late Sunday or Monday at which time we'll update the git repos available to students.
We also noticed that some new enrolments to the course (those of you who had been on the waiting list and only just joined the course) don't actually have access to our CSE Gitlab which is where we're distributing repos for Tutorials and Assignments. We're hoping that CSE's systems catch up very soon and give you access, but if you're still having trouble accessing our gitlab by Monday afternoon, please email the course at cs3421@cse.unsw.edu.au.
Help Sessions
We've had a lot of requests for Help Sessions, so we're starting to organise them now. Our current plan is to run these on Discord ( https://discord.gg/QcuVuPwqR4 ) on Friday afternoons pending tutor availability. We'll let you know more information about these when we've got concrete plans going, but we're definitely working on it!
Lectures
As usual, lectures this week are on Youtube as live streams (and accessible there as recordings after the fact). Week 2's lectures are available in the Lectures section of the course website and the slides are in progress (as usual!).
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics Teaching Team)
Hello all!
We're less than 24 hours away from our first lecture for this term. Here is some information for you to get started:
Lectures
All of the lectures from the course will be live streamed on YouTube and will be recorded there for you to replay if you need.
The links to specific lectures are in the Lectures section of the Course Website . If you want to see all the videos for the course, they are in a YouTube Playlist: COMP3421 Lectures .
Tutorials
Our tutorials are going to be run on Zoom. You will have enrolled already in a tutorial time slot and will have information on the time, but not the location of your tutorial. Our Tutorials section on the course website will show you how to access the Zoom room for your particular tutor (you must be logged in as a student to see this) as well as give you access to the Tutorials git repo where sample code and tutorial solutions will be published.
Course Forum
While we have a discord running ( https://discord.gg/YrFE7DAN ), it is more of a conversational space and less useful for formal and technical questions. So, for content specific questions where you can search easily for answers and be able to help each other, we have our official course forum, hosted on Ed. Please see the Course Forum section of the course website to get access to this forum.
Getting Started
Knowing that Graphics and C++ might be rather difficult things to jump in the deep end for, we've provided some resources to get you started. We're doing this with the assumption that people have completed certain pre-requisite computing courses at UNSW, but not necessarily specialised in C++ and definitely not in something like OpenGL.
On the course website, we have two sections:
These two should provide useful instructions and reference that should get you up to speed so that you can start coding in the course. We're also working on a small Cmake primer that will hopefully help out a bit and we'll let you know when that's ready.
See you soon!
We're looking forward to having some fun delving into the tech that makes Computer Graphics work, as well as seeing some of the important games and films that got us to where we are today.
Marc (on behalf of the Graphics teaching team)
Hello there!
This is the first notice sent to students of COMP3421/9415 Computer Graphics for Term 3 2021.
First up, here's where you can get information about this course:
The course website is hosted by WebCMS3 (similar to a lot of CSE Courses) at: https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3421/21T3/
The course also has an official discord which we'll be using for some course announcements and chat where you can have conversations with course staff and other students. Here's the link: https://discord.gg/YrFE7DAN
For a general overview of the course, you can look at the course outline:
https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3421/21T3/outline
We're working hard in the background right now to get the course ready for next week's start and some of the first week's content is ready for you to check out in the Lectures and Tutorials sections of the course website.
We hope you're looking forward to getting into Computer Graphics and seeing how the wonderful world of virtual imagery works.
Marc Chee (on behalf of the COMP3421 Teaching Staff)