Course Review for Midterm Exam

CS 493/693 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

You should know the basic physics, mathematics, and general implementation for:

Newtonian particles, with wind resistance.
Spring-based tets, wheels, and cloth.
Enforcing boundary conditions by imposing forces, velocities, or positions.
Psychological "forces" such as used in boids.

Combined with these simulation techniques:

Enforcing boundary conditions by imposing forces, velocities, or positions.
Leapfrog time integration.
Simulation stability: timestep limits, limiting rates of change.
GPU simulations, with the simulation data in 2D textures.

In addition, you need to know these basic graphics operations:

Making 3D models in Blender.
Scaling particles to screen space.
Drawing little billboards.
Depth sorting and alpha compositing.

If you've followed the concepts in the lecture notes and example code, you should be ready.

Stuff that won't be on the exam:

The meaning of the second parameter to glTexParameteri, or other OpenGL minutia. (However, basic OpenGL may be there.)
Which button to click in Blender. (However, basic modeling info may be there.)

For graduate students

The lecture notes include links to published papers (e.g., Boids, invertible finite elements, cloth simulations). You should read and understand those papers.