Group19
(M. Buschbach & Valdis Riekstins)

About the Helicopter:
In order to construct the helicopter's body, we originally tried drawing a shpere and then applying matrix transformations to stretch and bend the sphere into the shape of a helicopter cockpit. This method failed because of the irregular placement of points in the sphere, and after all our matrix transformations we had odd points sticking out of our cockpit. We chose to implement the body of the copter as polygons (triangle primitives). Although this produces a rather artificial-looking result, it is still much cleaner than the stretched sphere.
Our design is also very math-intensive. To draw the windows on the helicopter we had to create a wrapper function for the triangle primitive that would take in all the corners of the polygon, draw the green polygon, compute the center point, find scaled points inside the polygon to draw the window at, compute the normal to the plane, and finally draw the windows offset out from the green polygon to make it visible. We also spent a lot of time trying to solve our rotation problems. Our sliders for roll, rotate, and dive angles do not truely affect the helicopter in its relative axis, and despite our best efforts to solve this problem we were unable to improve upon our original design.
Further, we implemented a spotlight to play on our theme of an attack helicopter on a covert operation. This spotlight can be moved along the vertical and horizontal axis to perform a search for the helicopter. It's not hard to find.
In designing and implementing our model, we kept in mind the animation we would be doing in the future, and tried to include features that would make that future task as easy as possible. We'll see how it goes.