This feels like more of a math/physics class, or SIMULATION class, more than a computer science or ANIMATION class. Pretty much every project is "implement this mathematical algorithm that we told you about in lectures". All animation libraries are handled for you, so it ultimately just comes down to a lot of interpolation formulas, physics, etc. That's not to say there's nothing interesting here: Keyframes, collision detection, etc are discussed a bit - but Video Game Design, which I'd already taken, talked about a lot of these same concepts already, leaving mostly mathematical implementation.

The TA's for the course were fantastic, and clearly very engaged and happy to be helping out students. So I have a lot of respect for how they're running the course. Assignments have a lot of extra bonus points available if you're willing to apply a deeper level of understanding, and the vast majority of the grade (85%) is covered by assignments and quizzes that have unlimited attempts. And even the exams were really easy, so long as you studied even a little.

I'll note that if you never took linear algebra or differential equations, you'll have a little bit of catching up to do; but it's all stuff you'd learn within the first couple weeks of those math courses, so nothing too bad.

So all in all, I think the course is run quite well. It's just that you should consider whether implementing mathematical interpolation/simulation algorithms in numpy is interesting to you. If so, you'll love this class, but it wasn't for me.

It was very math heavy and all assignments were done in a python web interface but I feel like it was more learning about linear algebra and NumPy than anything else. Pretty boring unless you plan on implementing an animation system within an app like Blender or Maya, I was hopping the projects would be more interactive.

I took this course in Summer and even considering that I spent around 6 hours a week on average. Since the material could be grouped in biweekly blocks, my actual workload was: "On first week I'll do everything (~12 hrs), and the second week I'll do nothing (0 hrs)".

But my commitment and comment is heavily biased. I enrolled in this course because I was interested in reviewing things like differential equations, systems of PDEs, physics, and not actually interested in animation. That interest faded away after a couple of weeks where I lost all my interest and did the bare minimum to get an A.

But don't get me wrong, I was the one at fault here. All this aside...

The course really touches interesting and progressive topics starting from keyframe animation and ending with deep reinforcement learning (without assignment due to reduced schedule). The TAs were really present and active. Even the instructor was somewhat involved.

I found the lectures sometimes uninteresting and short. Some weekly topics are covered in less than half an hour. Most of the time, maybe, that was more than enough time to cover the minimum.

In general, the assignments covered what was taught in class but I didn't like that they felt seriously oversimplified, like we mostly animated atomic objects like an (x, y) point of an impicit shape, which still left me wondering how one could animate complex structures or scenes (I kind of imagine how, but didn't finish the course feeling confident in animating things other than an isolated point in space). Also, assignments are done in Python and animated through Matplotlib, though actual animation code was always provided.

Quizzes are easy and with unlimited attempts, making them basically free points. There's a comprehensive final exam that's slightly harder than the quizzes, and proctored, but not quite stressful since there were a lot of extra credit opportunities worth ~5-7% extra points.

All things considered, I don't think I can recommend this course unless you're on the Computer Graphics specialization (like I am) since there aren't that many course available. Not the worst course, not the best.

This course is not difficult, and it's instererting, but it focus on traditional dynamics rather than physical AI.