The professor usually plays some animated shorts at the beginning of lecture which are pretty interesting. His lectures however are straight from the powerpoint and pretty dry. Our midterm was only 10 multiple choice questions so it was pretty stressful... for the most part the questions were easy and there was an extra credit question that is usually about WebGl. The final project was honestly pretty fun as you can create anything you want to display graphical elements and I had some OP teammates who made our project a lot better. The tiny graphics API that we use, however, is not user friendly and there is not much documentation on it so I'm honestly not sure if the things we learned when using it will be of much help. Shoutout to Yunqi Guo for being an awesome TA, he discussion sections really helped me understand the material more and he's really nice but a bit soft spoken.

This is a great class! The lectures are clear and the environment is very friendly. I do wish that the homework assignments were a little more connected to the lecture material (we had no instruction in how to use WebGL other than the code comments written in the example files). We also didn't know what to expect for the midterm and final since the lecture material and homeworks were unrelated, and we had no practice with the mathematics taught in lecture. The group project also felt a bit rushed and not well-defined, but was still fun to work on. Overall, a great class that just has an unusual organization.

This class involves a great deal of mathematics (linear algebra) and rightly so. Without that, you have no hope of making the computer display anything.

As Prof. Terzopolous said, if all you want is to become one of the digital design-type people using Maya or something, you can get that at a community college. Here at UCLA they'll teach you the actual mathematics that makes all of that fancy stuff possible. Without understanding the mathematics, it would have been impossible to create tools like Maya anyway.

The second project is open-ended and involves groups. It has certain requirements as well as one or more advanced features. The advanced features can become quite tricky if you get into some things involving glsl (shaders) like shadow mapping or bump/normal mapping, but if you manage to figure out the shader stuff, you can make your project look way cooler.

The final project, a raytracer, is also not to be underestimated. Some people left it too late in Week 10. You can spend hours trying to account for small errors in your image, until you finally get it to look like it is supposed to.

Do not take this class if you aren't willing to sit down and work through the mathematics. The final exam was very challenging by all accounts with only a 60% average. The hardest three questions on the final all involved transformations of objects in a coordinate system by a (long) sequence of affine transformations. I easily spent over 1 hour out of the total 3 hours of the exam on just those three questions, but I got them all correct.

Overall, I recommend this class with Prof. Terzopolous if you're looking to work hard, create some pretty cool graphics, while understanding the (nontrivial) mathematical details allowing you to do all of this.

Okay.. so Slides are definitely boring and this class is super math heavy. However, tests are multiple choice. However, you get negative points for every wrong answer....
Prof is usually late to class and his slides are super math heavy

Project 1 took an easy 10 hrs.
Project 2 took way longer.
Project 3 took roughly 15 hrs.

Honestly, the tests and the projects don't line up and aren't reflective too much of one another. Tests are also super math heavy. Expect how to do rando calculations.

Midterm was easy 12 questions...
Final was like 50...... :(

Midterm: 100%
Final 60%

Projects worth 45%
Midterm worth 25%
Final worth 30%

Prof is like a genius and won many oscars, so he is like a celebrity. Also, he doesn't have office hours. He's reading through his slides again every time like it's the first time.. aka you don't learn too much during lecture, BUT go during review seshes! Those are your lifeline to the class.

Lectures are dull, material is covered very superficially on both lectures and on tests, and projects are just okay. Medium-level in terms of difficulty and workload - you won't like it, you won't hate it. It's painfully clear how little engagement the professor has with this class. Overall, a pretty bad learning experience.

The lectures are based on slides, of which much of the material is either math or very math-based. Yes, math on slides. The idea of teaching math from slides, without doing actual problems, without writing out actual derivations, without communicating what the heck it's actually about, is absolutely alarming to me. If he wants to emphasize math (which I think he thinks is important, and which is a goal I agree with), he has to change his methods. Fortunately for you, the tests only require very shallow understanding of anything.

Take the class if you need the credits, you can get through it just fine, but don't expect to learn much.

Demetri is a very nice guy, and he can explain things on the slides very clearly. How kind is he? I got 74% (median is 74%) on the final (although I believe TAs probably made some mistakes grading my final), I still get an A.

Grading scheme:
45% assignment (15% each)
25% midterm
30% final

Course Material:
This course is very theoretically based and seems to be outdated. Demetri covered an old version of OpenGL, which should be before the advent of unified shader GPUs. The assignment 3, ray tracer project, seems ancient as well. The test files are wrong and are not updated for decades, and the template still uses C++98 instead of C++11.

I heard that some professor actually teaches unity engine to create games in CS 174A, but definitely this is not the case for Demetri's CS 174A.

Tests:
Tests are easy, but you have to go over all the slides to memorize the details / usages of techniques and be careful to his questions. I still don't know why I got 74% in the final, but in the midterm I mixed up the order of matrix multiplication and lost 6%.

Assignments:
The assignments are not hard by any means. The first one can be done within two hours, and the third one is basically interpreting formulas into C++ code.
The second assignment asks you to build your own polygons and write a story / game. It is very very time consuming.

Professor Terzopoulos is a kind person but he is basically the antonym of teaching. CS174A could have been full of fun, but he basically reads through all the slides that are probably decades old. I'm not complaining about the contents of the class which involves lots of linear algebra( which are essential to understand graphics), but seriously, one can't teach math without using the blackboard and Professor Terzopoulos doesn't use the blackboard. The classes are therefore boring and pretty useless.
The projects and exams are probably decades old as well and are not too hard. I would suggest to avoid him.

My T.A. had midterm and final study lists that were basically exactly what you need to know. I thought his curve was fair, I did about average on final and a little above average on midterm and did all projects and got A- which I guess is about right.