DM815 Computer Game Programming III: Physics

Spring 13, 4th quarter
Rolf Fagerberg

Official Course Description

See the course description at the web pages of the faculty.

Time and Place

The course starts April 8 and ends May 23.

Textbook

For the first part of the course, we will use the lecture notes from the Particle Dynamics and Rigid Body Dynamics parts of the 2001 SIGGRAPH Course on Physically Based Modeling by Witkin and Baraff.

For the second part of the course, we will use the following textbook:

Collision Detection in Interactive 3D Environments
By Gino van den Bergen
Published by Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2004
ISBN 1-55860-801-X

The book can be bought in the SDU bookstore. The book has a website (click on menu entry "Interesting") which includes errata, and a nice set of slides.

Examination

The exam is oral, with grades on the 7-point marking scale. There is a programming project which must be passed in order to attend the exam. The deadline for the project is Wednesday, May 29, 2013, at 12:00.

The date for the oral exam is June 19, 2013.

At the oral exam, you draw an exam topic delineating a part of curriculum which you are to present. The details of the exam format is described at the bottom of the list of exam topics.

Lectures

Date Time Room Contents Reading
Tuesday, April 8 14-16 Imada seminar room Introduction to course. Start on physics simulation: particles. The course introduction slides. Sections 1-4 in the Witkin notes.
Thursday, April 11 12-14 Imada seminar room End of physics simulation of particles. Handout of project. Elastic collisions of balls. The first subsection of the Wikipedia page on Runge-Kutta methods.Sections 5, and 7 in the Witkin notes. Notes by Chad Berchek on elastic collisions of balls in 2D (in 3D, simply change the separating line to a separating plane in the last half of the notes). The math left out in the derivation in the 1D part in the first half of the notes can be found in these notes by Patrick Rutkowski (not curriculum).
Monday, April 15 14-16 Imada seminar room Start on physics simulation of rigid bodies. Sections 1 to 3 in the Baraff notes.
Thursday, April 18 12-14 Imada seminar room More on physics simulation of rigid bodies. Sections 4-6 and 8 in the Baraff notes.
Monday, April 22 14-16 Imada seminar room End of physics simulation of rigid bodies. Sections 9 in the Baraff notes. Overview over terminology (English and Danish) for physical quantities underlying rigid body simulation.
Thursday, April 25 12-14 Imada seminar room Start on collision detection: background concepts. Chapters 1 and 2, excluding pages 25-27, in the book by van den Bergen. Some parts are overlapping with DM809 and were not covered here (skim them as a recap).
Monday, April 29 14-16 Imada seminar room Basic primitives. Sections 3.1-2 in the book by van den Bergen.
Thursday, May 2 12-14 Imada seminar room More basic primitives. Sections 3.3 and 3.4.1 in the book by van den Bergen. The proof of Theorem 3.1 may be skipped.
Monday, May 6 14-16 Imada seminar room More basic primitives. Rest of chapter 3 in the book by van den Bergen, except tests involving polygons (3.4.3, 3.4.5, 3.4.7).
Thursday, May 9 12-14 Imada seminar room No lecture due to public holiday (Kr. Himmelfartsdag/Ascension day).
Monday, May 13 14-16 Imada seminar room Start on spatial data structures. Sections 5.1-2 in the book by van den Bergen.
Thursday, May 16 12-14 Imada seminar room More on spatial data structures. Rest of Chapter 5 in the book by van den Bergen.
Monday, May 20 14-16 Imada seminar room No lecture due to public holiday (Pinse/Pentecost).
Thursday, May 23 12-14 Imada seminar room Emo Welzl's O(n) expected time algorithm for finding minimum enclosing disks and balls. Discussion of exam and exam topics. Sections 1 and 2 in: Emo Welzl, Smallest enclosing disks (balls and ellipsoids), in New Results and New Trends in Computer Science, LNCS vol. 555, Springer, 1991.

Course Evaluation

As part of the Study Boards schedule of course evaluations, a course evaluation has been carried out. The aggregated answers (with comments removed for anonymity, as required by the Study Board) and the teachers plan of actions are now available, as is statistics on the grades given.

Maintained by Rolf Fagerberg (rolf@imada.sdu.dk)