Rob Leahy

Rob is unfortunately one of those characters who is shy, can't be bothered with special cases, and is annoyed at students who ask too many questions. One of his major faults is that while the topic is extremely interesting, he makes the material illogical, nonsensical, and in our case he only got through perhaps 3/4 of the entire course by the time the final exam was foisted on us!

He takes his time to get through course material, easily getting confused by students who don't understand the material and have difficulty picturing objects in three-space.

The lack of matrix math abilities on the part of the students seemed to endlessly frustrate Leahy--luckily I was exempt from that particular.

The labs were the best part of the course. Too bad the final had nothing to do with them. The hardest questions on the final were that last quarter of the course that he skipped--visualizing a numerically-defined object in 3-space according to the OpenGL calls he gives you is a real pain--choose the image which would most look like a final render. What the heck?!

Dealing with him outside of class is an exercise in extreme frustration--he'll duck you, and duck you, and duck you, and when he finally does see you personally, he'll be on his way out, no matter how long you've been waiting in those uncomfortable wire chairs they have near his office.

There are no exceptions to his "ways" and if he decides he doesn't like you, you'll get the same mark the whole semester, no matter how long you work on the final projects and assignments. I specifically tried to vary my work to see how he'd mark it--I did well in the first assignments once I figured out how the hell to link the sample code he gave us, and then I spent five minutes on the next lab. C+. The final bonus/play project I spent close to two weeks in 3D Studio modelling, pain-stakingly texturing, point-editing a true human form, designing rocks, cliffs, a Cthulhu monster, and water with semi-accurate ripples in it. The nearest competition was a POV-Ray image of a cylinder with a sphere that cast a shadow on it. My grade? C+. The sphere-guy's grade? B. What the heck?

As a final note, Rob's final has practically nothing to do with the course material and uses only the obscure, memory-dependent hints you get in the hand-outs and labs. There is only brand-new, never-before-seen problems that you've never practised with. So it's extremely difficult to get a decent grade unless you know and are very familiar with OpenGL programming to begin with.