Your first assignment is designed to place you immediately into the heart of graphics: design and model a short animation or interactive system. This assignment is intended to give you an appreciation for some of the decisions, problems, and challenges that exist in the field of graphics.

This assignment is intentionally open-ended, although there are a few guidelines. You have a choice between creating a traditional animation or an interactive illustration. If you choose to do an animation, it should show at least one "character" performing some simple action and last about 30 seconds. If you choose to do an interactive system, it should allow the user to control elements in a scene to demonstrate a concept or manipulate other elements in the scene in a complex and sensible manner.

Some examples include:

Notice how simple and concise these example descriptions are, yet they evoke a variety of different animations. What will distinguish your animation is its clarity, creativity, and effect.

This is such an open-ended assignment that you could spend your entire semester working on it. You are not expected to knock yourself out over this (that is expected for your final project :-). Have fun with this assignment!

For general entertainment we will show all your animations in class. If you have any particular instructions for running your animation, please include them in a text file named README in the same directory as your animation script.

Submit your final animation using the project name "animation" following the directions given here.

Resources