Group22
(Nicholas Bone & Brooke Snyder)

As you can see from the pictures, we chose to make a model of a cat (the pictures are, clockwise from upper left, "Stalking", "Kick-boxing", "Gimme Some Food!", and "Very Old Cat"). We were concerned about making the cat look realistic, so we shaped the different body parts very carefully. To this end we created several new primitives, including a deformable egg shape and a bendable deformable cylinder. We also checked out a couple books on cats from the library to guide us. Aside from changing colors, our cat can open and close its mouth, stick out its tongue, wiggle its ears and wiskers, blink its eyes, dilate its eyes, move its head up and down and side to side, arch its back, bend left or right, sit down, move its legs at every joint, and swish its tail with six degrees of freedom. The user may watch this at any angle near or far, using an adjustible light source to provide illumination. We also did a little bit of simple animation to complement some of the cat's moods. If we had more time, we would have: (1) explored texture mapping and material properties; (2) added more degrees of freedom (side-to-side movements) in the legs; (3) added retractile claws; (4) expanded the animation sequences to include complex behaviors such as walking or following a wind-up mouse model. We thouroughly enjoyed this project and are very proud of our model. If any of you would like to borrow some of our ideas just let us know and we'd be happy to share!