What kinds of things are on the exam (big hint alert)

by Mike Gleicher on October 26, 2014

Several people are asking – via email and Piazza – about what will be on the exam in detail.

I wanted to avoid direct replies since if I inadvertently give a hint, I want to make sure that everyone gets the same hint.

So, here are some hints…

  1. You are not responsible for knowing syntax of anything (SVG, C++), or the specifics of the parameters of a library. You might be asked to write simplified psuedo-code, or to read programs (most likely in a simplified form).  
  2. In general, we try to create questions that rely on you remembering and understanding concepts, not necessarily remembering the details of the equations. If you think about it, in class, we usually derive the equations we need based on the principles.
  3. You can get pretty far remembering the important concepts, and not necessarily the details of the equations. If you don’t remember what the magnitude of the cross product is, you should still remember orthogonality and right-hand-rule.
  4. I try to avoid having people need to do too many calculations by hand (since many of us make silly arithmetic mistakes). You will not need (or be allowed to use) a calculator.
  5. Having the intuitions for the equations is more important than memorizing the equations. For example, we didn’t even have the blending functions for Catmull-Rom cubics in class – I think I told you to look them up when you need them. But you should understand how the control points relate to the properties of the segment (for example, to convert to Hermite form). And from Hermite form, you could convert to Bezier form or …
  6. For example, you may not memorize which way the negative sign goes in a rotation about the Y axis, but you could probably figure it out if you needed to by remembering the right-hand rule. You should know the properties of a rotation matrix.

OK, and here’s a big hint for reading:

  • Even though everything we discussed in class up until now is fair game (including texturing), there are no texturing questions on the exam. I had intended to write a texturing question, but I didn’t like the ones I came up with. You should still know about texturing. And everything else!

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