The Story

Didi is an adventurous warrior who flies around treacherous snowy mountains with a magical helmet. Unfortunately, this is quite a cheap helmet without a proper chin strap and she must hold onto its horns for safety. To push the plot along, monster birds appear out of nowhere. They don't peck out her eyes, but our heroine is unluckily an ornithophobic; she loses her grip on the horns and tumbles to her death.

Modeling Techniques

The clouds in the title page are randomly generated density maps rendered as an isosurface. The icy mountain range are fractal surfaces.

The giant birds of prey are hierarchically modeled with quadric surfaces, and the deformed horns as menacing beaks. All the birds are copies of one bird translated and rotated into place.

Didi's suit of armor and her magic helmet are hierarchically modeled with quadric surfaces: ellipsoid, cones, cylinders, and parabloids. The horns are also a quadric surface with the equation:

H(theta,phi)= ( .5*(1-phi)*sin(2*pi*(theta+1)) - 1.4*sin(1.8*phi),
                phi , .5*(1-phi)*cos(2*pi*(theta+1)))
where 0 < theta < 1 and  0 < phi < 1

Her body has more than sixteen degrees of freedom, ten for her arms, elbows, and hands, and six for her legs and knees. Since she is flying about with a propellor helmet, we simulated a jerky motion by rotating her body slightly on the x and y axis periodically.

Didi's Facial Expressions

Didi's face is a polygonal mesh in which individual groups of vertices are deformed according to a convoluted cosine function. This animation uses the result of another project by Dan Hung and Heji Kim: more information about the techniques used to animate human facial expressions can be found here. In our animation, she smiles initially at the beauty of the scene before her, and later screams with fear as she falls to her death.