CPSC 424, Spring 2021
Final Project Guidelines and Ideas

The final project for CPSC 424 is due at the regularly scheduled final exam period for the course: Tuesday, December 7, at 7:00 PM. There is no final exam. The final exam period will be used for student presentations of their final projects.

Final projects must be selected in consultation with the professor and approved in advance. The project can be individual work, or it can be a group project for two or three people. For group projects, every participant will receive the same grade. All the projects should be different, so it will be good to choose a project early, before someone else grabs the topic that you want.

Several types of project are possible, including: a research paper — in proper style for a paper, including notes and bibliography; a well-documented programming project; or a shorter paper plus some kind of practical work exploring the same topic as the paper. (But no, your project cannot be making a game using a game engine like Unity.)

The project includes a presentation during the final exam period, which will be part of the grade. You should prepare a ten-to-fifteen minute presentation for an individual project and ten minutes per person for a group project.

Schedule

• October 18 – November 8. Consider topics for the project. Meet at least once with the professor to discuss ideas. Get preliminary approval for a selected topic. Remember that if someone else gets a topic approved, then that topic is no longer available for other people.
• Monday, November 22, the Monday before Thanksgiving. Turn in a written progress report, including a more detailed outline or design for the project and a list of information sources that you are using.
• November 29 – December 6. Meet with professor at least once to discuss plans to finish the project and plans for the presentation.
• Tuesday, December 7. Projects are due. Presentations during the schedule final exam period, 7:00 to 10:00 PM.

Ideas

Here, in no particular order, are some possible topics, to help get you started thinking. You can design a project based on one of these ideas, or come up with something entirely different. But remember that whatever your topic is, you have to get it approved.

• Design and write any interesting computer graphics program using WebGL, three.js or even OpenGL. (You would need to get a specific idea approved!)
• PBR (physically based rendering) has become a hot topic. It's used by the Principled BSDF Shader in Blender, and for MeshStandardMaterial and MeshPhysicalMaterial in three.js. Find out more about it, how it works, and how it is used in (for example) three.js and in Blender.
• Look into physics engines, how they work, and what they are used for. This could be a research paper or a shorter paper with some demos using the Blender physics engine or using a physics engine in three.js.
• Investigate particle systems. Maybe write a short paper about them, with some demonstrations in Blender (which, besides using them in animation, also uses them to make hair). Or write a particle system engine for WebGL, with some basic physics
• Virtual reality and/or augmented reality. How does it work? What is being done with it? How is it programmed? (I'm told HWS has some virtual reality headsets, maybe in CTL. Is it possible to write some kind of simple program for them?
• Look into one or more of the other modern graphics APIs: Vulcan (open successor to OpenGL), Metal (Apple), and Direct3D (Windows).
• GPGPU (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units). Systems such as Cuda and OpenCL let programmers use GPUs for computing that has nothing to do with graphics. This can bring tremendous computing power to bear on certain types of problems including, for example, Bitcoin mining. This could be a research paper—or maybe you could even write some simple OpenCL or Cuda programs. Or investigate using "compute shaders" in some graphics API.
• Modern OpenGL. Look into OpenGL 4.6. What are some of the things it can do that we haven't learned about? In particular, you might look at other kinds of shader program (geometry, tessellation, compute). It might be interesting to write a graphics program that uses a compute shader.
• A program to implement ray tracing, or maybe even path tracing, for scenes containing only simple objects (that is, objects for which its fairly easy to find the intersection with a line, and then to find a normal vector at the intersection point).
• Webgpu, a successor to WebGL supporting more advanced features including compute shaders, is currently under development and can be enabled as an experimental feature in Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Maybe write a short paper about it plus a demo program that uses it.
• A paper on spatial partitioning algorithms, maybe with a demo program. Look at quad trees, oct trees, and/or BSP (Binary Space Partition) trees and how they are used. For example, BSP trees can be used as part of the implementation of the painter's algorithm. And spatial partition data structures are used in computer games and general graphics processing for things like more efficient rendering and collision detection.
• A serious paper on computer graphics in the movies or for computer games, looking at some of the advanced techniques that are used.
• Graphics Hardware. Write a paper about the hardware architecture of modern GPUs. For example: Learn how they implement parallel processing and how they organize memory. Find out how a TPU (texture processing unit) works. Look into specialized computing cores for ray-tracing or machine learning
• Investigate character animation, how characters are rigged and animated. Maybe with a demo in Blender.
• Write Blender. (Well, not quite Blender, but a simple program that lets the user do some interactive 3D modeling.) Or, write Gimp, or Inkscape.