Exams

There will be a midterm and a final. See class schedule for dates.

Midterm

The midterm will be in the testing center take-home, open book, open notes, open everything except asking other people with one page of notes.

Question on the midterm will be taken from the following list of topics:

• use of local information versus global information in both plant and terrain modeling.
• discuss algorithms based on appearance and models based on process in both plant and terrain modeling.
• fractal dimensions for fractals created by combining scaled copies of a single shape.
• L-systems.
• hierarchies of objects to model plants as used in XFrog
• comparing different methods for modeling plants in terms of how artists or other non-technical people might use those models.
• modeling trees from photographs as discussed in Neubert's 2007 SIGGRAPH paper
• fractional Brownian motion, relationship between frequency and amplitude, how it works to model terrain.
• Musgrave's model of erosion and weathering on heightfields.
• Navier-Stokes equations: meaning of each term, how gradients, divergence and the Laplacian are used to model fluid dynamics.
• compare terrain erosion algorithms in 2D and 3D including strengths and weaknesses.
• compare terrain models based on heightmaps and voxel grids.

Final

The final will be take-home.

Study lists for both exams will appear in this space about a week before the exam.