main-finalexamtopics

CS559 Final Exam

The CS559 Final Exam will be held at 2:45 pm in room 1221 (same as class). The exam is scheduled for a 2 hour time slot.

While the exam is cummulative and can cover anything from the entire semester, the focus of the exam will be on the topics from week 9 onward.

A discussion of the topics in the first half of the course is available at the midterm topics page.

Good places to remind yourselves what we’ve covered:

• The Main.Calendar
• The Main.Readings page
• The pub:Lectures page with the lecture notes

The topics covered (after week 8 (lecture 24), and likely to be on the exam):

• Spline derivations

• B-Splines

• Local lighting and Shading

  • Phong lighting model (as in OpenGL),

• Basic surface concepts

• Representations of surfaces

  • Meshes and collections of polygons

• Texture Mapping

  • basic ideas and reasons

  • Assigning texture coordinates

  • Perspective correction

  • Texture Sampling / MipMaps

  • Advanced texturing tricks

    • multi-texturing
    • bump maps, displacement maps
    • environment maps, shadow maps

• Subdivision surfaces

  • basics of parametric patches and why we avoid them (bilinear patches)
  • Subdivision concepts (limit surface, exact evaluation)
  • Regular/irregular meshes, extraordinary points
  • triangle subdivision scheme
  • butterfly and modified butterfly schemes
  • loop schemes
  • catmull-clark schemes

• Rasterization

  • line drawing methods
  • triangle drawing methods (Scan conversion)

• Graphics Hardware

  • pipeline concepts

  • pipeline performance issues

  • programmable pipelines

    • what can/can’t be done in the shaders

• Rendering (light-based or physically-based)

  • global lighting effects
  • ray-tracing (from the-eye or from-the source)
  • basic ray tracing
  • distributed ray tracing
  • Light path Calculus
  • Global illumination
  • Radiosity
  • Bi-Directional Ray Tracing (photon maps)

• Non-Photorealistic rendering

  • motivation and definition
  • Stylized lighting
  • Contour drawing
  • artistic drawing styles

• Color

  • tristimulus color spaces / imaginary primaries
  • Gamut analysis, CIE diagrams
  • subtractive color
  • Artist centric color systems

• Image Coding

  • Lossless Coding

    • RLE
    • entropy coding concepts
    • Huffman and LZ coding

  • Lossy Coding

    • JPEG

  • Video Coding

    • MPEG

• Visualization

  • types of problems

  • Scalar Fields

    • psuedo colorings, transfer functions
    • isocontours
    • marching cubes algorithm

  • beyond scalar fields

You are responsible for topics discussed in lectures and in the required readings. Topics from the readings that we did not cover in class (animation) will not be on the exam.

While I hate to advertise it (since it makes it harder for me to re-use questions), the old exams from previous years are on the web. We’ve covered a slightly different set of material, but they can be good for getting an idea of what kinds of exams we give in this class.

• Last year’s “Practice Exam” (note: the promise that these questions will appear was for last year). here.
• Last year’s final and its answer key
• 2005 exam key