Body language and Personality

Although Foxy's character is a cat, I felt it necessary to also look into human behaviour with the same traits. I decided to look at the common factors of a humans negative body language, this generally involves:

• Shoulders drawn back
• Persistent eye contact (staring)
• Arms crossed over the chest
• Sweating
• Hands clenched to make fists
• Swaying back and forth
• Grinding Teeth

Ref: http://www.bodylanguageexpert.co.uk/what-negative-body-language.html

From the list there are only a few that I could apply to Foxy's character. In particular I feel that the persistent eye contact would be perfect as she will be focusing on Sonny throughout the animation. Standing to close to someone also came up, this is something that makes people feel uncomfortable. As the eyes seemed like an important part of negative body language I decided to look into it further.

From the research I conducted I found that narrowing the eyes gives a scowling impression, this instantly gives the feeling that you do not like the person you are looking at. Which is ideal for foxy and Sonny's relationship.

Ref: http://www.marcandangel.com/2008/07/07/25-acts-of-body-language-to-avoid/

Overall I decided that by combining the body language of a cat and that of a human my character would give an impression more suited to the villainous ways.

Cat Body Language

Ref: http://www.messybeast.com/cat_talk2.htm

The above body language image shows what a cats face looks like when reacting to different things. The main character Foxy will have her ears pricked forwards in an alert way throughout the animation. Although she is paranoid that the fish is plotting to kill her, she is fearful. She will approach him whilst he is unawares and carry out the plan she has had in mind from the beginning.

Observing my own cats body language has allowed me to clarify the way in which a cat thinks and acts. My cats face always looks innocent even when she is up to something. She will sit and sleep but never stop listening to what is going on around her and even when you think she is asleep her eyes will open at the sound of anything she doesn't like. She is always on guard. 

I also have a fish tank and my cat will sit and watch the fish for hours, I often wonder if she thinks along the same lines as Foxy. Her eyes dart around taking in every movement from the fish.

Music Choice

Four Seasons

Storyboard

Below is my storyboard for my animation. Foxy is pretending to be asleep by the table where the fish bowl sits. She is sneakly watching the Sonny the fish as he goes about his day in a merry way. Foxy hates this and the paranoid side to her believes that this is Sonny's plan to lure her into a false sense of comfort.

Foxy decideds to kill the Sonny before he gets to her first. She jumps up onto the table and daintly moves around the fish bowl whilst Sonny is unaware of the danger that is lurking. He goes to turn around when he notices Foxy with her nose pressed up against the bowl, grinning with her full set of pointy teeth. this alarms Sonny and he starts to feel scared. foxy then trys to push the fish tank so that it gets closer and closer to the edge, the whole time grinning to herself about how she had come up with this cunning idea.

All Sonny can do is stare down at the bottom of his bowl as it gets closer to the edge.

One last push and Foxy has completed her mission. Little does she know, however, that her house mate has just walked through the door and catches the bowl before it hits the ground. Foxy quickly pretends that she is asleep on the table, unaware of what has been going on whilst throwing evil stares at the fish. " Until next time" she mumbles.

Character Further Development

After Jo's comments I decided to develope the character of foxy further:

Name:  Foxy

Personality:  

Appearance:  Luxurious, shiny black fur, beautiful green eyes that turn black and white when Foxy is angry.

Goal:  To get the fish before he gets her.

Home:  A little house in the country.

Affiliations and Allies:  Foxy is a lonely character, not many people understand her wicked sense of humour, she tends to form fake friendships to get towards what she wants

Enemies:  The lodgers fish. Foxy find his whole look very annoying and would love to hit him in his goggly eyes!

Likes:  Foxy enjoys days lounging around being care free. She always keeps herself highly groomed and enjoys long baths. No microwave meals for Foxy, oh no, she only eats gourmet with tons of milk to wash it down.

Dislikes:  Foxy hates anyone who gets more attention than her. One person in particular is the lodger's fish Sonny. Unfortunately Foxy was told she has slight paranoia around 3 years ago. She is convinced that the fish is going to kill her, she is not sure how but determined to get there first. 

Powers/Abilities:  Has the ability to look fabulous at all times, even in the mornings!

Fate:  Foxy will be kicked out, occasionally being allowed to come over and eat.

Quotes: " I can resist everything but temptation"is

Sonny's Fish bowl

I wanted to create a simple glass fish bowl for Sonny to live in. I did this by creating a sphere and taking the top third off.

I then found a tutorial which showed me how to give the bowl a glassy effect. I opened up the material editor and renamed one of the materials glass, I then assigned it to my bowl. i set the ambient and colour diffuse to black, the specular level to 275 and the glossiness to 45. I then went on to set the falloff type to fresnel.

In the material editor I added a new raytrace map in the refraction slot and set the level to 80. I then enabled supersampling to the glass so that the reflections were smooth and not grainy, I selected MAX 2.5 (after rendering theimage the glass still appeared grainy so this will be modified). I went on to add some planes so that once rendered an idea of reflections was viewable.

 I then cloned the fish bowl and applied a push modifier with a value of -0.5. Within the material editor I then made a copy of the glass material and named it Glass Interior, I enabled the 2 sided option for this material and made sure that the original glass material did not have this selected. I then assigned this material to the clone.

Tutorial Reference: http://www.3dvalley.com/tutorials/creating-realistic-glass-material-in-3ds-max/

Fish Bowl

Sonny's Home

Sonny

Sonny

And so, Sonny was born...

I was able to find a tutorial online on how to create a fish. This gave me a good basis on how to get started with Sonny. Firstly I downloaded the reference images from the tutorial and set up the planes for the front, side and top of the fish within 3D Max.

I then created a box with the length as 20.138, the width as 47.105 and the height as 12.746. I moved the box so that it was covering half of the fish face. I then moved the vertices over to cover the whole face and adjusted them to give it shape.

I made the box see through so that I was able to see the planes. I then selected the planes and adjusted the vertices to fit the plane.

I continued to do this up to the mouth. I then selected the front polygon and moved it by the Y axis to bring the front of the fish face forward.

I continued the shaping of the fish by moving the vertices of the top of the fishes body.

Below is an image of the finished body:

I then wanted to add some fins. I created the top fin by selecting the top for edges and extruding the upward, three times. I wanted Sonny to have two top fins so I created them at the same time. By moving the vertices I was able to give them fins some shape.

The side fins were created in a similar way. I selected an edge towards the lower end of the body and extruded them out. The tail fins were created by selected the end polygons and using extrude and bevel to bring them outwards. I then moved the vertices to give the fin shape.

I created the eyes for Sonny in the same way that we did in our tutorial (post is below)

I then went on to add material, and a mouth which was done by again extruding polygons.

Reference for the tutorial: http://www.3dk.org/tutorial/3ds-max-Modeling-a-Golden-Fish.html