INTRODUCTION
M O D E L I N G A N D A N I M AT I O N , L A B 0
Mark Eric Dieckmann
Monday 4th April, 2016
16:13
Abstract
This lab is intended to present the basic guidelines
and familiarize you with the code structure used for
the lab course in Modeling and Animation (MoA).
We will look at how to fetch, compile and run the
application. We will also look at how to present
your findings in a report.
1 Introduction
The code structure is designed to be as simple as
possible and still support your work well during
the labs. It offers a G U I where you can do simple
transformations and manipulate the visualization of
your models. There is a lot of code already written
so you can focus on implementing the core ideas
and theory behind the methods discussed during
the course.
2 General Guidelines
These are general guidelines and rules for the orga-
nization of the labs.
2.1 Labs and lectures
The lectures focus on topics that are directly relevant
for the labs. You should understand the lectures and
the theory part of the lab script before you come to
the labs - the lab hours will be enough only if you
come prepared. We have scheduled one lab lasting
1
Gabriel Eilertsen
2 hours for the introductory lab and 7 labs lasting
3 hours to implement labs 1-6. Lab 7 serves as an
extra lab. During the labs you work in groups of
two. If you bring your own laptop or if there are
computers available you may also work alone. But
no more than two people are allowed in each group.
2.2 Presenting Results
Gabriel Eilertsen will help you with your questions
related to the implementation of the code. When
you are finished with the implementation, I will
ask questions regarding your code and mark your
lab as completed if you answer my questions in a
satisfactory way. The marks are pass / not pass.
2.3 Writing Reports with LaTeX
LATEX is a document preparation system that of-
fers programmable desktop publishing features and
extensive facilities for automating most aspects of
typesetting and desktop publishing. For example
numbering and cross-referencing, tables and fig-
ures, page layout, bibliographies, math formulas
and much more. To use LaTeX you need special
software which is available in the lab computers. If
you want to install it at home LATEX is available for
most platforms, see
http://www.latex-project.org/. I personally
use MIKTeX for Windows and the default LaTeX
(pdflatex) installation in Linux. MIKTeX standard is
available in the computer room K4507 and free to
download from miktex.org.
2.3.1 Report
All 6 reports are personal and should be written in-
dividually as they will be the base for an individual
grade. The reports have to be written in LaTeX and
sent to me as a pdf file. There is a LaTeX template
on the course page. Compiling the LaTeX source
code in the same directory as the figure using pdfla-
tex gives you a pdf document like the compiled
version on the course page. You can use the LaTeX
source as a blueprint for your reports.
The reports should not contain pseudo-code. If
you use information from text sources other than
the lab script or the lecture notes then you have to
refer to these sources. The report should be self-
contained, which means that it should not be nec-
essary to read other sources such as the papers that
you list in your reference list. You can assume that
the reader is familiar with the lab script and the lec-
ture notes and explain the algorithms covered by
these without going too much into detail.
Subdivide your report into an Abstract, an Intro-
duction, a Background section and a Results section.
Abstract: summarize in about 80 words the re-
ports content and focus primarily on your results.
The section Introduction provides the reader with
a compact description of what the aim of the lab
was. You do not go into technicalities in this part of
the report. You describe in own words the general
idea behind the lab: How do we expand in this lab
our program, what approach do we take and with
what goal in mind?
The Abstract, the Introduction, your name, the
course code and the title of the report (for example
Lab 1: Mesh data structures) should fit on the first
page of the report without leaving too much blank
space on it.
The section Background should take up about one
A4 page if you aim at a grade 3 and about 1.5 A4
pages if you aim at a 5 (excluding Figures). You give
in this section a more detailed description of what
you have implemented in this lab. You can use 2-3
figures to support your description. For example, if
you describe the half-edge mesh, you introduce a
2
figure that shows how the edges are connected and
you describe it in the text.
The section Results should describe your results.
You should show about 2-4 figures (2 for grade 3,
3 for grade 4 and 4 for grade 5), which you made
with your program, and describe what you see and
how you achieved that. This section should cover
1 A4 page if you aim for a 3 and 1.5 pages if you
aim for a 5 (including Figures). The Results section
should end with one short paragraph (4 sentences
or so) that summarizes your results. It is followed
by a sentence stating the grade you want and the
list of references if you have any.
The total length of your report should be about
3.5 pages for a 3 and about 4.5 pages for a 5 (in-
cluding all figures). You can use subsections in the
section Results to distinguish the individual tasks
you implemented. Please avoid using subsections
in the Introduction and Background and structure the
text solely by using paragraphs.
3 Supported Systems
To make the code cross-platform, we use the wxWid-
gets library1 for the user interface. This is supported
for many platforms and compilers, but during the
labs we restrict our support to Windows 7 using Vi-
sual C++ Express Edition 20122 . The lab computers
in K4507 run Windows. If you bring a laptop with
a different system we cant guarantee it will work,
but you are of course free to give it a try.
4 Getting the Code
The code and sample datasets are available in the
form of zip files on the course homepage3 . It is
recommended to store the code on a local hard drive
during the lab since this will speed up compilation
times. But remember to move your files to another
storage (e.g. H: or USB stick before leaving the lab)!
1 http://www.wxwidgets.org/
2 http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/
3 http://www.itn.liu.se/mardi/WebPages/Courses/TNM079/courseTNM079-
2014
5 Additional libraries breakpoints) since this will drastically slow down
the application.
The wxWidgets libraries need to be downloaded
separately from the course page if you work in Win-
dows. We use the version for VC++ 2012 (the lab 7 Code Structure
computers use VC++ 2012). You can extract the files
in the VC++ directory for the build system to detect After successfully compiling and running the appli-
them automatically (see next section). However, if cation we can have closer look at the code structure.
you have little storage left on your network storage The G U I is implemented in GUI/FrameMain so you
you can put them anywhere on a local drive. can start by looking through this class (we have
also supplied the file GUI.fbp which you can use to
modify the GUI in wxFormBuilder). An important
6 Compiling class is also GUI/GLObject which all objects added
to the scene inherit from (such as meshes, implicits,
cut planes etc.). A base class for geometrical objects
We use CMake4 to create build scripts for differ-
is Geometry/Geometry which adds transformations
ent environments. After having downloaded the
and the vital Update() and Initialize() functions.
code and the wxWidgets libraries (see above), open
Feel free to browse around and take your time to
CMake. Browse for your source code directory and
familiarize yourself with the code.
choose a directory for the build. For example, if
your code is at H:\Code, you can create a directory
H:\Code-build for your build. Next, press config-
ure to check for a working environment. If every-
8 Acknowledgements
thing is fine, it will report configuration done. If The lab scripts and the labs were originally de-
the wxWidgets library is not found, you have to set veloped by Gunnar Lathen, Ola Nilsson, Andreas
the correct directory in the wxWidgets ROOT DIR pa- Soderstrom and Stefan Lindholm.
rameter. Each time you change a variable you have
to press configure to rebuild the configuration.
When everything is done, press generate to create
the solution/make-files in the build directory.
Note that the entire code-base is available from
lab 1, but only the files necessary for each corre-
sponding lab will be included in the build. This
makes it easier to navigate in the source files in
the beginning. Before each lab we will update the
CMake-file to include the files for the next lab. If you
want to skip ahead, you can select the advanced
parameters in CMake and check the box for a later
lab, e.g. BUILD LAB3 which will include all files up
to, and including, lab 3.
In Visual C++, you need to set the MoA project
as startup project by right-clicking on MoA and se-
lect set as start-up project. You can either build
using Release or Debug settings only choose
Debug if you actually debug your code (e.g. using
4 http://www.cmake.org/