COMS W4160

eh not bad, some assignments were kinda time consuming, but they were all quite rewarding. 6-7 assignments in total, one every two weeks. There was also a written final exam.

The workload in the first half of the term was quite manageable -- the first two assignments took some thinking, but didn't require lots of code. The next two assignments were a lot more coding intensive. Coding-intensive is pretty typical for graphics courses, though, from what I understand. The assignments were all good learning experiences -- I feel they were the best part of the course. We were asked to work in groups of two on all the assignments, though some people worked on their own by the end because of people dropping the course, etc. Coordinating with a partner could be a bit of a hassle, but certainly wasn't as difficult as it is with larger groups.

Intense. Weekly programming assignments that take about as long as the bi-weekly ones I get in other classes. I'm astounded by the sheer amount of things I had to learn how to do. He doesn't do extensions, save for a general ten-points-off-for-hour-late policy.

Relatively light workload: around 1 assignment supposedly every week (but it ended up every 1.5 weeks), graded leniently as long as you implement the algorithm correctly (check against the example outputs/oracle, and pay attention to the gotchas that pop up on Piazza or in the slides). For each assignment there's an optional creative submission, though unlike the competitive pit in Computer Animation, this is just for fame + maybe a few bonus points at the end. There's a final exam too that's designed to be relatively straightforward for people who've attended the class or read the textbook, and have done the assignments. For us it was a series of short answers. It was pretty relaxed, and most people finished way ahead of the time limit. 80% Weekly assignments 20% Exam

I liked Hadi, he was a very kind professor. I also liked how everyone else in the class was quite passionate about the subject. Coding assignments were fun, some were harder than others, taking from 5 to 30 hours depending on which one... I also liked how the final exam was only 20%. Overall, highly recommend this class for being one of my favorite cs classes I've taken so far, I really learned a lot about graphics

Professor Ramamoorthi's lectures were generally fairly dry and could often be hard to follow. His accent isn't really an issue, but he has a way of failing to frame the question that's motivating what he's talking about; you get no sense of what he's building towards. He also doesn't speak very confidently; it's hard to tell whether he's entertaining a possibility for class discussion or actually saying that this is an accepted practice. The lectures tailed off in quality by the end of the course (as did attendance, precipitously); some of the lectures got into mathematical details well beyond the requirements of the course and well beyond what most people in the class could readily understand. As far as slides go: the slides were a fair basis for looking things up on the internet later, but no better. The course was well organized insofar as the assignments go; the course fell down in other respects. The assigned readings in the main textbook (Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley) often had only a tentative relationship to our lectures, and their pedagogical approach was very, very different; it's a good book, but was useless for the class. Other assigned readings included big swaths from the OpenGL red book -- hundreds of pages in all. Fortunately, I think most of us were smart enough to know that one doesn't learn a programming API that way. Another example: the materials and…

Professor Grinspun is old school. His classes will punch you in the face and make you learn out of self defense. He's a very good teacher. This class is definitely the closest I've had to "drinking from a firehose" style learning. There's not really a whole lot else to be said The guest lectures were all great and relevant. Almost half the course was guest lectures, partly because we sort of ran out of things to cover partway through. Start the ray tracer early.

I don't know why there hasn't been a review of this yet! This class (taken Fall 2016) is an amazing class, and Professor Reed is -the- man to take it with. He's extremely nice, funny, and accommodating. The lectures move at an easy but reasonable speed, and the professor takes the time to provide intuition for and break down all the math and algorithms (if the diagrams in the slides weren't already good enough). At the end of some classes, we even watched some funny old shorts that showcased whatever concept we learned that week and that led into a bit of the interesting history in graphics. There were plenty of resources available - all the TAs were super helpful in office hours and on Piazza too. The class is also well-paced in that the amount of work is relatively light throughout the entire semester, though we still somehow went through a lot of content. We go through things like colour theory, lighting models, basic algorithms for geometry (ray-object collisions), and their application to ray-tracing and pipeline rendering, interspersed with some short review o graphics-related linear algebra. Once the basic rendering process is down, we also get into optimization through special data structures, and sampling methods. By the end, we will have made a few interactive animations in OpenGL and a full-featured ray tracer. Each assignment builds slightly on top of the previous-…

Grading is 80% HW and 20% Final. There were 7 assignments on the syllabus, but we only completed 6 as the Professor kept extending the deadlines. They passed our HWs through their own test cases, but we are also supplied with what the final output should look like. So, if your output resembles the correct output, you most likely will get an A on the HW assignments. The only A that I didn't get was HW6 bc I started really late on it. EdStem is your BEST friend, a lot of the students helped each other out on there, the TAs didn't respond as much on EdStem towards the end of the semester though. If you're a procrastinator, you could definitely pull a weekend of all nighters doing this HW. I spend 3 straight days working on building a sphere (I slept though). No midterm, one Final. The professor says it is an easy final, but the average was a 65% so I would study. I received all As and one C on the HWs, and received a 75% on the final exam. My final grade was an A-

Some of you think that only the "bad students" wrote bad reviews for Prof. Ramamoorthi. The fact is, first day of class there were people in the hallway because the class was so overcrowded. By the end of the semester, about ten people showed up to lecture. I guess most of the class consisted of students who were doing badly.