My master's thesis, which I combined with my project for CSC 474, simulates the path a leopard shark (triakis semifasciata) has taken, recreating its journey through animation. The program takes input from a series of timestamped locations that were recorded from an actual tagged shark off of the Californian coast. Each point makes up part of the path the shark took through the ocean. The points are connected toghether through a hermite spline.

The shark itself comes from a custom file type I designed to be exported from Blender 2.4 that includes skeletal armature information embedded in the geometry. Then, each bone is animated from the path itself combined with scientifically derived shark behavior. The simulated bone values is then converted into a keyframe to be interpolated against. Previously, the program only took in keyframe data that was entirely user-created.