2022 November 13,

CS 311: Exam A

Exam A was oral — that is, a one-on-one interview. Students signed up for 15-minute time slots. Many of them used only 10 minutes. There were two questions, as follows.

A. One conceptual question, depending on how far behind you are. Example follow-up questions are in parentheses.

1. What determines the position of the camera in the scene? (How do you set the camera's position in practice? When you do that, which variables in memory get set? If you wanted to print out the camera's location, how would you do that?)
2. What does the vertex shader do? (What inputs does it take? What outputs does it produce? What is an example of its practical value?)

B. One implementation question, depending on how far behind you are.

1. How did you implement clipping? (How many helper functions did you use? What were their roles?)
2. (This question is about the engine before perspective-corrected interpolation.) In meshRender, between the vertex shader and the call to triRender, what do you do? (What do you do first? Do you use any temporary variables?)
3. What is in the shader program (shaShading struct)?