Animation:

• See if you can get an object to follow a path over time. You an do this by specifying values for each animation frame for translation, rotation, scale. Just put these values into an array, indexed by animation frame. Then as the animation runs, use successive values from the array to make translation,rotation,scale matrices to build the shape or camera transformations.

  You can make the animation loop just by running through the array repeatedly, going back to the beginning of the array after you've reached the end.

• Try to make jointed figures. For example, can you make a simple bird with flapping wings? You need to have the wings rotate over time, using some undulating function like Math.sin(time) as the time-varying angle of rotation.

Shape:

• Creating artistically interesting shape models

  Replace the simple boxes that I've created with something more ambitious. Can you model a dog or a house? A human face or body?

• Procedurally generated shapes

  If you're mathematically inclined, see if you can write a program that automatically generates mathematical shapes to be displayed in the renderer. Start with simple shapes, like a sphere, and then see if you can create mountains or clouds, or dodecahedra.

Authoring interface:

How do you help users create content for a renderer? A really good way is to provide them with an intgeractive user interface that lets them create shapes, move, rotate and scale them into position, and set their colors.

You could choose as a project a simple graphical user interface that allows people to add a shape (from a menu of possible shapes), and then manipulate sliders to vary that shapes position, rotation, size and color (red,green,blue).

User interaction

Find some interesting way to hae users interact with the scene. Make a little game out of it. Some examples:

• Put up two shapes side by side. The one on the right is a randomly rotated version of the one on the left. The user needs to rotate the shape on the right (by dragging with the mouse) to closely match the shape on the left. To gain points, they need to do this before a time limit runs out.