Homework 11, due Wednesday, Nov 20.

Introduction to Splines:

In class we covered cubic parametric splines, and touched briefly on bicubic parametric surface patches. What I would like you to do for this assignment is to implement an interactive Java applet that allows the user to compose a Bezier spline curve by adding control points, and by dragging around control points. Your program should behave as follows:

Helpful notes:

Opportunities for extra credit:

As usual, there are lots of opportunities for extra credit in this assignment. You can constrain the key points so that successive spline segments have the same slope where they join. You do this as follows:

You can do forms of spline specification other than Bezier (eg: Hermite, B-Spline, etc.) You can try to do something other than cubic splines (eg: fourth degree Bezier). You can try to make interesting content, such as specifying alphabetic letters. Over the next day or so I'm going to be posting a list of interesting opportunities for special credit, so watch this space.

Next week we are going to be focusing much more on bicubic spline surfaces.