Read Me
The purpose of my project was to create and animate a fish and to have some basic textures for it. Although it's not Finding Nemo, it was fun to attempt.
Controls:
You can change the meshcount on most of the fish with M and m.
1, 2, and 3 toggle the lights.
and s changes the shading mode.
Techniques:
The fish body was a cosine of rotation, with its side profile going from cos(3PI/4) to cos(-3PI/4). Its somewhat thinner in the z direction. Its side fins are strophoids. which wiggle in a cosine wave. I had a hard time getting the normals to look right, until I realized that I had to define each fin twice with opposite normals (and then turn on backface culling). Although, the fin isn't exactly atached well to the fish (it never separates from the fish, but sometimes it intersects with the fish's body) I could not find a good slution for this. the tail fin is just a cosine curve again. This I also had to define twice in order for the normals to appear correctly.
The body, tail, fins and eyes all wiggle in the shape of a cosine curve. Notice how this is not a linear transformation and it's a miracle that it all worked out. This didn't approximate fish movement as much as I would like, but I think it still seems better than no wiggle movement. The fish scale texture I got from corbis, which is a terribly ugly thing, but there is a somewhat limited supply of fish scale textures in the first place. The fish swims in a figure eight around the two piles of sand. The figure eight is created with the fish rotating around one point in one direction and another point in the other direction. The piles of sand are the cosine curve again in disguise.