The third assignment was the first that allowed us creative content. The purpose of the assignment was to implement a hierarchical model by creating a puppet - a modeled character that could be manually turned about and moved around defined joints. My puppet was a knight, complete with suit of armour and a sword that could be thrashed about. He boasted 36 joints from the visor of his helmet, to the fingers of his left hand. The snapshot above appeared on the class t-shirt.

Mark received: 105%.

The fourth assignment involved the creation of a raytracer - a program capable of rendering near-photorealistic images given a set of geometric shapes that sit in the scene. Along with implementing ray intersections and performing lighting calculations, we had to add one additional feature not specified explicitly in the assignment, and create a unique scene that demonstrates that feature. I implemented Combined Solid Geometry (CSG), and created a Winter Olympic scene (which I had spent of most of the previous two weeks watching) to demonstrate it.

Mark received: 110%.

The major project is the main reason for the course's fame, and is well-known for the incredible amount of time required to complete it. The topic of the project is free-choice, and I decided to create a computer version of Risk, the classic board game. The program featured textured 3D terrain with varying levels of detail, modeled and animated characters (infantry, cavalry, and artillery), Motion-blurred and reflected dice, magic halos, and particle explosions. The project implementation spanned 24 days, required over a dozen all-nighters, and ended with 21,576 lines of code and 24 pain-stakingly created images for textures and maps.

The game compiles and runs on four platforms: Win32, Cygwin, Irix, and Linux. The Irix and Linux versions were stabilised by the project deadline. The Windows version will be repaired and enhanced as time allows. When a working version is ready, it will be made available for download. Currently, two snapshots of the game in action are provided above.

Mark received: 100% objective mark; 110% subjective mark.