Choose one of the following two topics. Using whatever programming tools and languages you favour, produce the materials described. I will grade with particular attention to visual pizazz (1. Dazzling style; flamboyance; flair. 2. Vigorous spirit; energy or excitement.), and will provide extra marks for extra stuff. You may use tools such as modellers (I use Blender quite a lot) or renderers (ditto Luxrender) or camera trackers (ditto Voodoo), but you must explain in your submission what tools you used (i.e. I don't want to give you credit for building a modeller if you just used Blender).
Each alternative can be done in teams of up to three. Your submission is due on or before 24 May 2012 Submit by sending the required materials to me by email, using the phrase CS419 in your subject.
Alternative 1 - Particle fireworks in the real world
Produce a movie of particle fireworks superimposed on a real backdrop (as examples, keep in mind the particle movies I showed in class). The camera should move during the movie, and the fireworks should be visibly 3D (for example, you might have a mortar that explodes sending sparks in all 3D directions from the point of explosion). There should be three visually distinct types of firework, where the visual distinctions are not just colors. You can use Voodoo or suchlike to do the camera tracking. You should use your own code to do the fireworks. I will look for (a) spectacular fireworks and (b) fireworks that are technically complex to execute. Submission is by: giving me a movie, a brief explanation of what to look for, and a brief explanation of what tools you used and why.
Alternative 2 - Removing an object from an animated movie
Produce a short clip of a legacy animated movie where a foreground object has been removed and the background filled in. Doing this involves using some mosaicing code to determine what the background looks like (for example, look at the paper "Turning to the masters: motion capturing cartoons" by Bregler, Loeb and Chuang, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2002). You can use others' mosaic code, because you will need to fiddle with it to compute the background. Submission is by: sending me a before and after movie, a brief explanation of what to look for, and a brief explanation of what tools you used and why.