2020-11-07 Fall For Brandeis: 3D Animation

In today's lecture I give an introduction to my course, CS164a on 3d Modling, Animation, and interactive VR

I also talk a little about the research that I do and how undergraduates have participated.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

1. create 3d models with photorealistic materials and textures

2. create action libraries of animations of 3d models

3. create short 3d animated movies

4. create interactive virtual reality scenes running in a web browser

5. explain the fundamental concepts underlying 3d modeling, anima4on, and virtual reality

Teaching/learning strategies

Typical day

    • watch videos and do social reading before class

    • I give an 20-40 minute lesson introducing new skills and concepts

    • students go into breakout rooms of 3-7 to practice those skills

    • the TAs and I visit the breakout rooms and offer help when needed

    • we all come back to the main room and look at what selected teams have done

Assessment

* creative projects (making 3d objects and scenes, 3d animated movies, 3d Virtual Reality apps)

* in class and take home quizzes to demonstrate mastery of fundamental skills

* team project to put everything together

Resources

* My videos

* LinkedIn Learning videos

* Online Documentation

Software Systems

* Clara.io

* Blender

* Glitch.com

* Peer-Review App

* Zoom (of course)

I have allowed livestreaing of lectures for the past 4-5 years, so transitioning to Zoom was not such a big change.

Creating VR apps using A-Frame, ThreeJS, and Glitch.com

Let's give a taste ... we are currently studying A-Frame and Three.js and deploying these using Glitch.com.

Here is my site: https://glitch.com/~a-frame-demos

Let's have a look at how to create 3D VR scenes using the AFrame approach on Glitch.com.

You can do this at home!

Modeling and Animating using Blender

Lets now look at how we create models and animations using the free and open source Blender tool

http://blender.org

We'll also look at the assessments we use in the class to estimate mastery.

Research Projects

I'll give a brief overview of my Research interests and describe some projects where undergraduate students have been involved.

Courses at Brandeis

I'm currently also teaching CS10a: Problem Solving with Python which is a course for non-majors.

The intro courses we suggest are

CS10a -- Problem Solving in Python -- for students with no previous background in Computer Science or who want a refresher

CS12b -- Advanced Java Programming -- for students interesting in becoming a CS minor or major

CS21a -- Data Structures and Algorithms (12b is a prereq)

CS29a -- Discrete Structures (the Mathematics for Computer Science)

New Courses -- several new courses on Machine Learning, Data Science, AI, Computer Vision, etc.