CS 557 -- Winter Quarter 2024

Paper Analysis Project

100 Points

Due: Tuesday, March 19, 23:59:59, No Bonus Days

This page was last updated: January 8, 2024

Introduction

The project requires you to read a shader-related paper and write a 5-page (1.5 spacing) analysis of it.

I have collected several possible papers for you to review. Here is the list:

• Advanced Depth of Field

• Advances in Real-Time Skin Rendering

• Computing Shortest Path Maps with GPU Shaders

• Deferred Shading

• Drawing a Diamond

• Efficient Shader Tricks That Will Impress Your Friends (this is long -- you don't need to cover it all)

• Hair Rendering and Shading

• Light Shafts: Rendering Shadows

• Normal Map Compression

• Practical Parallax Occlusion Mapping for Highly Detailed Surface Rendering

• Real Time Skin Rendering

• Richer Worlds for Next Gen Games: Data Amplification Techniques

You can also find your own paper, but it must be a real "research" paper, not an article or a blog entry. Also, I must approve it before you go too far in reading and analysing it.

You do not need to understand the equations in the paper. Just understand the general themes of the paper -- what they are doing, why are they doing it, how they are trying to do it, etc.

The 5-page Paper You Submit Must At Least Cover

1. What is the general theme of the paper you read? What does the title mean? What are they trying to do? Why are they trying to do it? (I.e., what problem are they trying to solve?)

2. You can copy and paste images or graphs from the paper into your paper, but not as a way to have to write less to hit the 5-page requirement.

3. Who are the authors? Where are they from? If you can tell, what positions do they hold? Can you find out something about their backgrounds?

4. What did the authors do?

5. What conclusions did the paper draw?

6. What insights did you get from the paper that you didn't already know?

7. Did you see any flaws or short-sightedness in the paper's methods or conclusions? (It's OK if you didn't.)

8. If you were these researchers, what would you do next in this line of research?

These need to all be your own thoughts. Do not copy-and-paste the authors' thoughts.

Spacing needs to be 1.5

There needs to be a cover page, and, no, that doesn't count as one of the 5 pages...

You can organize this any way you want, but if it was me, I would just copy-and-paste these questions into a word processor document and then follow each question with the text that answers that question.

Turn-In:

This paper should be turned in as a PDF file on the Teach system. It is due 23:59:59 on the listed due date.
Note: Bonus Days cannot be used on this project. Sorry. I've already made the due date as late as I can.