Second Meeting

Agenda

1. Change the name of the SPP?
2. Possibility of Wednesday meetings?
3. Overview of structure of radiosity project
4. Overview of radiosity
5. Q&A

Summary

Minutes

Change the name of the SPP?

• Some people have mentioned that the Student Programming Project sounds unprofessional
• Student Programming Project does have an OK acronym though (SPP)
• Discussed the possibility of starting with a cool acronym and then thinking of a matching name
• Possibly one name for the radiosity project and another name for the group itself
• Some brainstorming but no good ideas

Possibility of Wednesday meetings?

• Some people can never show up on Thursdays
• Some people have business on Wednesdays
• Discussed possibility of alternating days

Overview of structure of radiosity project

• Overview by Mark Visser (this is my interpretation of it, so it may not be completely correct)

• Radiosity Renderer itself consists of seven of interconnected parts
• Starts with the parser which reads a text file description of the scene
• This information is sent to the tesselator which breaks down complex objects into polygons
• All this is stored in a special topological data structure which holds the polygon info in a format which makes breaking polygons into smaller polygons easier (this is done a lot in radiosity)
• This structure can also approximate a lot of smaller polygons with a big polygon etc. to speed up calculations
• Meshing breaks down the polygons into smaller polygons
• This is sent to the form factor calculator which does some key calculation needed before radiosity can be done
• Then there's the actual radiosity step which is actually not too difficult once the other steps have taken place
• Afterwards, everything is sent to a 3-d engine for displaying the resulting image.
• The 3-d engine and parser are non-essential and can be borrowed from elsewhere
• The entire process relies upon a geometry library consisting of points, matrices, lines, and other primitives
• This, in turn, relies upon a general library of lists and trees etc.
• Most of the work is actually in the geometry library
• Even if people don't understand how the radiosity works, the geometry library contains a lot of simple concepts that they can work on
• The CS488 (Computer Graphics) lecture notes have detailed and readable info about radiosity
• These notes can be found at http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~cs488

Overview of Radiosity

• Overview of polygons and stuff
• Most of it will be covered by a talk next week by Professor Steve Mann

Q&A

• Mark Visser managed to get Professor Steve Mann to give the SPP a talk on radiosity next week
• Unfortunately, there's a CS240 mid-term next week on Thursday
• Possibly hold meeting on Wednesday, late Thursday, or Friday
• Discussed the merits of breaking into small groups so that people can work intensely and in-depth on little parts vs. working as one large group where everyone sees how the whole thing is designed
• Discussed possibility of setting a time line and deadlines
• Discussed possibility of where corners could be cut if time becomes short
• Discussed possibility of weekend meetings

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