End of Semester

Amazingly we’ve made it to the end of the semester.

Go Make Some Cool Stuff!

I always end the last lecture saying something like that (maybe even those exact same words). We’ve spent a semester learning about how to make things. Hopefully, you’ll be able to make use of what you’ve learned. Over the semester, you’ve gotten enough foundations that you can make things. And its the starting point for doing more.

We didn’t have “last lectures” because I made the choice to let people focus on their projects. Judging from the projects, I think this was a good choice: a lot of people did great things!

You can look at the Gallery to see some selected examples of cool final projects.

At the end of a class, it’s easy (for me) to be disappointed at all of the things we didn’t get to talk about. It’s hard to imagine a graphics class where we didn’t talk about ray tracing. We didn’t talk about global illumination or high quality rendering at all. We didn’t talk about curved surface representations. We didn’t talk about animation (what motions to make and how to make them). I had wanted to talk about the methods used in modern applications (especially games) to better use the graphics hardware (particularly deferred shading). But, I think what we did cover, we covered well enough that you should be well-prepared to learn about these other topics.