I originally planned to do AR video effects, and let the virtual cat sit on the real computer. Although I made another video for various reasons, I still haven’t changed my mind. I still want to make an AR video. This needs to be done in unity, and it happens that my mentor Herman Ho knows how to do this and he helped me a lot in this regard. Even better, it didn’t take a lot of time since my animation was already done and I had good models.
But there are still some problems. The biggest problem is that the hair I made in Maya’s X Gen cannot be imported into unity. And the time I have now is completely incapable of reusing new software to make new hairs. So after I import my model and animation into unity. I’m going to directly modify the overall texture of the cat. I am very grateful to my tutor Herman who recommended the tutorial for the glowing crystal material. It saved me from having to make hair for the 3rd time. I made a cat with glowing crystal material according to an online tutorial. I love pretty and bright colors, and the previous video Cat on the Cloud used very bright colors as well. I’m very happy with the effect.
The next step is to use the AR technology in unity to make the virtual cat I made appear in the real world.
First of all, to make the virtual cat appear in the real world requires an anchor point, that is to say, a picture. After the computer camera recognizes this picture, the model will be generated on that picture. Of course, the picture needs to be converted a little bit, which is very simple, and the Vuforia Developer website can do it. As long as you find this website and register, upload the picture as the anchor point, and download it after the conversion is completed. I’m very happy with the effect.
The image I chose was the black and white still frame from the keyframe capture in After Effects. The color is not selected for the convenience of computer recognition. The whole picture should not be too complicated. If there are too many colors, it will be difficult to recognize. Especially because of my own preference, I rendered the whole photo colorful and too gorgeous. If the machine is used It will be very difficult to identify, and it is easy to make mistakes after the color changes due to different light effects from the outside world. It just happened that I grabbed a black and white still frame in After Effects for the convenience of class. So I used this image that was still framed as an anchor. It is also convenient to display after printing as a postcard.
The next step is to determine the location of the anchor point. Just place the image as the anchor point below the model in unity. Then the model will be generated at the position of the corresponding picture in the real world, and the animation will be played according to the camera lens. The lens of the camera can be moved, and the model will also display animations in various directions according to the positioned anchor points. It works really well, just a little tweaking of the size and position of the model relative to the model, and the cat is sitting on the computer, which is very interesting. I managed to make the virtual cat appear in the real world.
After the entire animation is rendered, it is time to start compositing. My topic is the cat on the cloud. Next, I need to add some clouds to the scene. According to the principle of lens language, I try to have different movement directions for short stories without moving. For example, when shooting a person walking, you can first shoot him from the left to the right of the camera, and then shoot obliquely in the next shot, so that he walks from the lower left corner to the lower right corner. You can change the direction again next time. In short, it is necessary to have different movement directions as much as possible, so that the whole short film can be more exciting. My lens is a fixed lens for convenience, so the whole animation needs to increase its interest when the lens remains unchanged, that is, its movement route. I plan to use the different moving directions of the cloud combined with the moving direction of the cat to create resolve this matter. Make my short films more exciting. Otherwise, if only the cat in the short film is moving, the whole short film will be too boring.
To make my animation more interesting, I don’t intend to make all the clouds move in one direction. First analyze the cat’s action path, from the left of the video to the right of the video, then turn to his left, and finally walk to the middle of the entire screen and sit down. And the cloud I’m going to add has three layers. The clouds in the foreground above the video and below the video are moving from left to right. The cloud layer in the background below the video spreads from the middle of the video to the bottom of the video. In this way, the movement path of the clouds below the video will form an L-shape from front to back, and then from left to right. This also happens to form a circle with the cat’s action path. Of course, I also tried to move the clouds with different action paths, but if the moving paths of the clouds at different levels in the video are completely opposite, it will appear very abrupt. But if all the clouds were moving in one direction, the whole video would look very boring. After many attempts, I settled on the current solution. Background clouds on the sky and foreground below, with layers moving from left to right. Clouds in the lower background spread downward from the center of the middle video.
Added another animation after the clouds were all done. Finally, after the cat sat down, a group of birds flew from the lower right corner of the video to the upper left corner of the video. This is a slanting upward movement trajectory that is different from the previous trajectory. It also makes the boring time after the cat sits more interesting.
Next was to color the whole scene, I couldn’t make my work black and white, that would be too bad. After I arranged all the cloud layers, I grabbed the key frame of the last frame directly in After Effects, and chose to export to photoshop format when exporting, so that the work I exported will be divided according to the layering of the previously synthesized video. Many layers. This also makes it easier for me to add color when coloring the video at different levels. Of course, in the final export, not only can the work in photoshop format be directly uploaded to After Effects, but also it can save time for subsequent synthesis and modification and make it clearer.
In order to know what color is more suitable, I found some references on the Internet. It was a sky reference. Excessive, the sky is white clouds, the ground is a city, very beautiful pictures, and the colors are also very beautiful. Although the overall color looks very complicated, in fact, the entire color change is changed according to the color temperature. Put the photo and the color temperature chart together and you will see that the color shift is exactly the same. The left part slowly changes from the brightest solar white to yellow, orange and red. The part on the right is slowly changing from cyan to blue in the sky, and finally a little purple.
Even better, due to lighting reasons, the left two special effect lights, the left one is red light, and the right one is blue light. And because the cat is moving, but the light is not moving, so the video starts when the cat is on the left side of the video as a whole is reddish, and when it is on the right side, the overall color is blue. Now the video background modification can solve this problem. . The left side is yellow light, because the dark side will change the hue, so the color will be reddish, the right side is blue light, the dark side will become bluer or even a bit purple due to the hue change. These match exactly the lights I rendered on the cat earlier. It also perfectly solves the problem that when the video is pre-rendered, the color of the cat is reddish on the left side of the video, and the color is bluer on the right side of the video. However, I found that the color at the intersection of yellow and blue is very dirty, and the color transition between the top and bottom of the video is not perfect, so I plan to add other colors in the future. Make the whole work more colorful.
After adding the background, the next step was to color the dark sides of the clouds. Because the cloud layer is moving, and the part of the dark side is different in each frame, so I plan to add the color directly and use a soft light coating, so that the software can automatically calculate and add the color to the dark side. Does not change the white of bright clouds. And because only 1~2 layers are added, the final overall calculation and rendering will not be particularly troublesome. After all, I don’t have enough time.
When looking at the overall color effect, I found that the color at the junction of yellow and blue is very dirty, and the color transition between the top and bottom of the video is not perfect. The background of the whole video is only blue and yellow, which is too simple overall. So I plan to add additional colors in the future. Make the whole work more colorful. In the end I plan to continue adding colors based on changes in the color temperature table. The yellow part changes from orange to red according to the color temperature, and the blue part changes according to the color temperature. Finally, a perfect transition can be formed between purple and red. I turned this layer into a soft light layer and it worked really well, but because the color saturation was too high, I lowered the saturation some more to make it more compatible with the tone of the entire video.
When I finally watched the overall effect of the video effect, I found that the two layers of clouds below the video were not too far apart, so I added a gradient layer of shadow between the two layers of clouds. Enhanced the effect of depth of field and front-back relationship between two layers of clouds.
Finally, I directly dragged the photoshop format file into After Effects, divided each layer, and adjusted the layer settings. After adjusting the color of the cat through the curve to make the color more obvious, my work will be rendered finished.
For lighting, I use 1 white main light source plus 2 colored special effect lights. I once learned how to light photography, and in this case, with one key light and two effect lights, I could do what I wanted. But photographic lighting belongs to real physical lighting in the real world. In Maya software, the software is used to simulate light. There is a certain gap in this aspect, but it is also very valuable for reference. And if the lighting can be adjusted during the lighting process, try to adjust it at one time, because the coloring and changes in the later stage often cannot replace the effect of the original lighting, especially the special effect light I plan to use. It is almost impossible to adjust to such an effect in the later stage.
Because my cat is white as a whole, but only white color will make the whole animation look very monotonous, especially after I will add white clouds, so I have to find a way to make the overall color more diverse, Otherwise, the wife is monotonous. So I plan to challenge one of the difficult problems in the design world, the colorful white.
Contrary to the colours used in painting, white light is a collection of all colours of light and it is impossible to add other colours to white light. When painting, mixing all the different colours of paint together, black will appear. And the situation with light is the exact opposite of what happens when painting. He discussed prism dispersion in great detail in his book Opticks (1704). He shone a beam of white light into a triple prism, which resulted in the refraction of different colours of light. This means that the white light contains all the other colours of light. Conversely, by superimposing all the different colours of light together, white light is formed. That is why it is almost impossible to add colour by light on a white object. Because white light already contains all the colours, no matter how much more light of other colours is added the result is white. And in many games the overall lighting is very dark. Not only for the sake of creating a scary atmosphere, but also because darker scenes can reduce more detail. And often times to reduce memory, and to speed up the computer. So ways are found to make the whole thing darker so that lower resolution mapping can be used, rougher modelling and the player can’t notice the details of the scene. And because my work is very white and very bright, more care must be taken with the details, otherwise any flaws will be magnified.
So it’s very difficult. The cat I made has white fur, and the scene I want to add later, such as the white cloud, is also white. So if I don’t want to increase the color of the whole work, the whole work will be black and white, which is very boring. I hope my work can have more colors and be more beautiful. But if you want to reflect white, you must use white light for irradiation. If the white cat is illuminated with light of other colors, then the cat will become another color, but if you want to reflect the whiteness of the cat, you can only use white light for illumination, then this work has There will be very few colors, only black, white and gray. So it is very difficult to add color to make the white cat colorful without changing its own color. What’s more difficult is that what I want to do is that the video is dynamic, so I can’t make all the colors fixed by painting, it will look very fake. This is the reason why brilliant white has become one of the conundrums in the design world. And I wanted to challenge that by making a colorful white cat.
The solution I chose was to use special effects lights to do it all, which is an advanced trick with lighting. First use a white key light to render the whole cat white, and then use two other special effect lights of different colors to color the shadow part of the whole cat. Since there is no way to change the color of the key light, which is the natural color of the cat, the best case scenario is to color the shadows to make it more colorful. In this way, more colors can be added to the whole scene without changing its inherent color, which is white, and because it is a shadow part, it will not appear too overwhelming. Whether it is special effect light or hidden color, it is a very difficult advanced skill.
The situation where only two special effect lights are turned on.
Although the overall theoretical requirements are very complicated, in fact, only three lights are needed to complete it. First, the main light of No. 1 plus the special effect lights of No. 2 and No. 3. The more light, the better. When adding a lot of light sources in a mess, it is often unclear what effect you want, or how to increase the light to achieve the effect you want. Therefore, adding lights indiscriminately has no benefit other than increasing rendering time.
The white of the key light is very easy to adjust the value, as long as it is bright enough to show the natural white color of the cat, but also has enough shadows that I can increase the color of the shadows with the effect of light. The difficulty lies in the two special effects lights. I need to use special effect light to make the whole scene add more color to the dark side of the cat, but the light cannot exceed the key light, and the light produced by it cannot change the inherent color of the cat’s white color, which is very difficult. And what kind of lighting can be used to add more colors to show better effects, which also requires constant testing and consideration.
The last two effects lights I settled on were red and blue. These two colors are complementary and will be very noticeable together, and will have a very nice purple transition where they meet, so that there are at least three different colors. And after I adjust the brightness, it will not seize the natural white color of the subject. I have used many different colors, among which the color of the yellow light is very inconspicuous and cannot show its color, and because it is dark sleep, the light effect appears more gray than yellow. And many relative colors, such as red and green together or in the middle transition will appear very gray, which is not good-looking at all. So after I tried many times I ended up using red and blue as complementary colors for the two effect lights.
Finally, I rendered the whole animation and found something very interesting when looking at the effect. After I put the picture into photoshop or After Effects, it turned out that the color rendered by the light on the cat was not obvious. The cat is almost all white. But after I put the rendered picture into Davinci, I found that the color is very bright, which is very interesting, but it also increases the difficulty for me and the subsequent Compositing. I need to add color to the cat and cloud in After Effects Then put it into Davinci for final Compositing and export. This also meant that I was going to use the compositing software After Effects for grading, and then use the grading software Davinci for compositing.
Fram 700
There are still some small problems in the final rendered video, because I refer to the real-world photography lighting, but my work is an animation, the cat in the video is moving, and because it is the light calculated by the software . So after the final rendering, there are still two small problems in details, but the impact is not big.
First of all, when the cat turned around in the middle, because the left side of my two special effect lights was red light, and the right side was blue light, so the cat was on the right side at that time, so there was too much blue light. For this problem, unless the light moves with the cat, or the blue part is slightly reduced in post-grading, it can have a very good effect.
And the second small problem is that after the cat finally sat down, the light spot in the right eye was too bright. And this problem, so can not be changed. Because the reflected light spots in the eyes are the reflected main light, if the size or intensity of the main light is changed, it will have an impact on the overall brightness. If it is a real world light, then the overall brightness can be lowered. Change the main light source to ambient soft light and then add special effect light. Because in real-world photography, the brightness is not fixed and the absolute requirement is the light ratio. For example, the light ratio between my main light and my two special effect lights is about 10:2~10:1. So as long as the light ratio is kept constant and the overall brightness is reduced, the same effect can be produced. But because it is in the software, the intensity cannot be reduced, and because it is the main light, if the main light is not enough, the whole will be very dark, and the special effect light will overwhelm the guest and change the overall color, which will be even worse. This is also the difference between software lighting and real lighting.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of September, my hair reached the neck and the most complicated head was done, because the Ragdoll is a longhair cat, and its cheeks will be longer and the inside of the ears will also be It has long hair, so it needs to be made in 3 to 4 times. That is to say, it takes 3~4 strings of nodes to complete the hair production of the head. The back part of the body and tail is very simple. I had expected to finish making the hair by the end of September. But the school’s computers were overhauled in September and were not open for use until the end of September. And by the time I started using the school computer at the end of September, the Houdini software was not found in the library of the school computer. Although Houdini can be seen in Curry later. However, other students who use Houdini said that the school’s Houdini is not stable enough. Some computers can be successfully installed, some computers cannot be installed, and some libraries are not even available. So I had to change the software that made the fur and recreate the cat’s fur. After considering different software, I ended up going to use Maya’s X Gen for the hair. Since my animations were made in Maya, it would be easier to continue making the fur in Maya without having to worry about any compatibility issues. And luckily the hair making in Maya is much simpler than Houdini and can be done on time.
Due to time constraints, I didn’t draw the textures on the cat completely according to my cat Moqi. I directly used the whole cat as a white cat to complete my work. However, I modified the color of the cat’s eyes, nose， mouth and paws. I made the cat’s eyes blue because the eyes of the puppet cat are blue, and the bluer the cat, the better the appearance, and then Moqi’s eye sockets and a circle around the mouth, and 4 paws changed the paw pads to pink. Because I had some problems with Houdini, the software I used to make modules, I temporarily switched to Maya’s X Gen for hair in less than two months. This didn’t take me long enough to finish the texture, so I simply changed it to a white cat instead of continuing to texture my cat Moqi.
When I continued to search for relevant information, I found that the hair made by Houdini might not be imported into Unity, so I made two plans. The first plan is, if Houdini’s hair can be imported into Unity, then make AR animations as originally planned. The second plan is that if Houdini’s fur can’t be imported into Unity, then I’ll render the furry cat animation. Just render the cat, then add some backgrounds drawn by yourself, and use AE to animate your drawings. I studied 2D animation in college, so I know how to draw and I know how to animate them using AE (Adobe After Effects), which is not difficult for me. And there are a lot of movies, like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018, and Arcane, 2022 that use painted backgrounds to save money and time.
I did a tour around the UK with a tour group during the holidays, and when I visited the Isle of Sky in the Scottish Highlands with the group, I saw awe-inspiring sights. A large number of clouds floated on the sea in place of seawater, like rolling waves. A rainbow is formed because of the humidity, hidden in the clouds, standing on the high ground, and looking at the canyon as if you are in the clouds. This beautiful phenomenon is so rare that it doesn’t even happen more than a week a year and I am amazed at just being able to see such a sight. I want to put it in my graduation project. I named it the cat on the cloud. The video I’m going to make is a cat walking around and sitting at a computer at the end. After I made the fur, I just need to render the cat, the cloud and fog effect can be made in AE, and then add the background and rainbow, it is also a complete work.
This photo was taken on the Skye Island in Scotland. The bottom is the sea and the clouds are above. The bright arc in the picture is the rainbow. Although it cannot be seen in the photo, if you wear sunglasses that can see polarized light, you can Clearly see the colors of the rainbow.
My next task is to make cat fur. Because the model of the bound cat I found has no fur, so I need to make the fur myself. The software I choose to make the fur is Houdini, because the fur produced by this software is very realistic, and it can even Simulates collisions between hairs. But his difficulty is also very high. Although it is also a 3D software, it is more inclined to control the nodes. The thinking and methods of this software are different from traditional 3D software, such as MAYA. Houdini’s way of thinking is more programming. There are many teachers in the school who know Houdini, but they don’t know how to make hair with Houdini. So all I can rely on is myself. This is a very big challenge. And there are often unexpected problems that occur. For example, the unit of Maya is meters, but the unit of Houdini is centimeters, so when I import the model from Maya to Houdini, I need to increase the model by 100 times. Because I didn’t know this at the beginning, the hair produced a different effect than it should, which added a lot of trouble to me. It also took me longer to make my hair than I expected.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of September, my hair reached the neck and the most complicated head was done, because the Ragdoll is a longhair cat, and its cheeks will be longer and the inside of the ears will also be It has long hair, so it needs to be made in 3 to 4 times. That is to say, it takes 3~4 strings of nodes to complete the hair production of the head. The back part of the body and tail is very simple. I had expected to finish making the hair by the end of September. But the school’s computers were overhauled in September and were not open for use until the end of September. And by the time I started using the school computer at the end of September, the Houdini software was not found in the library of the school computer. Although Houdini can be seen in Curry later. However, other students who use Houdini said that the school’s Houdini is not stable enough. Some computers can be successfully installed, some computers cannot be installed, and some libraries are not even available. So I had to change the software that made the fur and recreate the cat’s fur. After considering different software, I ended up going to use Maya’s X Gen to make the hair. Since my animations were made in Maya, it would be easier to continue making the fur in Maya without having to worry about any compatibility issues. And luckily the hair making in Maya is much easier than Houdini and can be done on time.
In the animation stage, first I refer to the animation principles of some 2D quadrupeds. Woods S. THE ANIMATOR’S SURVIVAL KIT[J]. Film Ireland, 2002. This book is very useful. Although research on the principles of animation of quadrupeds in 3D is difficult to find, the 2D aspect is very complete. So I referenced a lot of information in this area, and based on these materials, I made animations of walking and running of quadrupeds. Although when I started animating, I found that my cat didn’t walk or run like that at all. However, the animation principles part of this book is very useful, and this is also a must-learn course for all animation majors.
The animation part is divided into three parts. I animate the cat’s body part first, then the cat’s ears and tail, and finally the cat’s expression.
The whole animation The animation process was more difficult than I thought, because the cat’s movements are very large, but the cat hardly has any repetitive movements. Moreover, the cat’s movement speed is also very fast, which is very difficult for me to make animations. Sometimes I need to K several poses per second.
And cats have a very special bone structure. Studies have shown that cats have wider vertebrae with elastic fibrocartilage interspersed between the vertebrae, which makes cats more flexible. This body structure makes cats more flexible than big cats. Second, they can rotate the spine 180 degrees, while humans can only rotate 90 degrees. Because the cat’s reaction ability is very fast, the cat’s action frequency is fast and the amplitude is large, so it has caused great difficulties and troubles in the process of making animation.
There are several poses in a second. Mochi’s body often twists from an S-shape to an inverse-S-shape within a few frames because the core of the controllers is on his butt, and if you adjust one of them, the others follow. So while range of motion doesn’t seem to matter, all of the body’s controllers need to be adjusted. Also, it’s much harder to animate a 4-legged animal than a 2-legged human. The time it takes for each of his feet to fall and lift is different. These all require frame-by-frame, controller-by-controller adjustments.
And for the convenience of animation production, I chose the tail and ear parts to form a lot of mels, and the tail to form two mels. First the whole tail is one mel, then the second half of the tail is another mel, so it’s a lot easier for me to animate the selection controller.
It should also be noted that because what I want to make in the end is the AR effect, I need to see this animation from different angles. It is very perfect, and there will not be any strange places, so I put it when making the animation. There are three cameras, front, side and back. When you take a screen shot later, you can easily observe it from multiple angles to see if there are other bad points, and it is also easy to modify.
I originally planned to combine three screen shots from different perspectives into one video for broadcast, but because the screen shot was imported into the software, the report was wrong, so I divided it into three uploads.
After determining that my project needs to animate from a video, the first thing I do is storyboard, which is very important because making any video starts with a storyboard. But because of the reference video, the storyboard is very easy to complete. Because my reference videos are fixed shots and my main work is animal behavior research. So I didn’t plan to make complicated shots for the storyboard either. And because there is a reference to the action of the video for reference. The entire video content is very simple and not long, but some editing is required. First of all, Wan Cheng started to bite the screen immediately after sitting on the computer keyboard, so the part of the screen biting at the back of this video cannot be used and needs to be cut off. However, because the entire video is only 15 seconds in total, the time of the video after cutting out the clip that bites the screen is too short, so a part needs to be added in front.
So I found another part of the video, Moqi stepped on the keyboard from my computer, walked over, then walked to the coffee table next to it, and finally turned around and walked over. In this video, Moqi kept walking, but did not sit on the computer in the end. However, because the final landing point was on the coffee table on the right, it just happened to connect to the part of the video where Mo Qi was sitting on the computer keyboard. So I put these two videos together. Of course it’s not just a matter of getting it together. When I walked at the last moment, Wan Cheng turned to the right in the video of walking over, but the video of sitting down turned to the left. So you need to pay attention when making this part of the 3D animation. And in the first video, Mo Qi was sniffing the place behind the computer for a long time. This is a cat’s habit. The cat’s sense of smell is very sensitive. When he goes to a new place or is curious about something, he will smell it first. And when you greet your cat, let him smell your hand first. But it was almost stationary for a while, and Moqi’s head was not aimed at the camera, I can’t be sure of his expression, although I can look for other videos of cats smelling things as a reference, but I’m not sure if it can match my cat. So I plan to delete this part as well.
The full version of the video, this video is more than a minute long.
The video of the cat walking around on the computer is added to the front to increase the duration.
In the end, the video clip of the cat sitting on the computer was unusable because it started to bite the screen, and because the above video turned to the right, this video turned to the left, so you also need to pay attention when making animations.
Because the school’s computer is under maintenance, I can’t continue to use the school’s computer to make hair, so I plan to collect some materials that can support my design.
I found a public course on cats and dogs at the University of Edinburgh on Coursera. It talked a lot about the habits of cats and how to take care of cats well, which made me learn a lot. While half of it was about dogs, the cat content was very useful for my design, and I completed the entire course during this time. And there are many useful references in it, which I will also write in my thesis.
Although I have read detailed information both before and after raising a cat, in order to provide a very good life for my cat. But this one course still gave me a lot of inspiration. It also mentioned a lot that I hadn’t considered before.
The Five Freedoms outline five aspects of animal welfare under human control. They were developed in response to a 1965 UK Government report on livestock husbandry, and were formalised in 1979 press statement by the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council.The Five Freedoms have been adopted by professional groups including veterinarians,and organisations including the World Organisation for Animal Health, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The five freedoms as currently expressed are: Freedom from hunger or thirst by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour Freedom from discomfort by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area Freedom from pain, injury or disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment Freedom to express (most) normal behaviour by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind Freedom from fear and distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering History
Serpell (2013) Domestication and history of the cat. In: The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour. Turner and Bateson (Ed), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
John W. S. Bradshaw, Rachel Casey, Sarah Brown (2012). Chapter 5: Communication, In: The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat, 2nd Edition, Wallingford, CABI
Halls, V. (2011). Cat Detective. United Kingdom: Transworld.
Tan and Counsilman (1985) The Influence of Weaning on Prey-catching Behaviour in Kittens, Ethology, 70(2): 148-164
Kuo (1930). The genesis of the cat’s response to the rat. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 11, 1–35
Baerends-van Roon and Baerends (1979). The Morphogenesis of the Behaviour of the Domestic Cat. Amsterdam: North-Holland
Biben (1979) Predation and predatory play behaviour of domestic cats, Animal Behaviour, 27: 81-94
Adamec (1976) The interaction of hunger and preying in the domestic cat (Felis catus): an adaptive hierarchy? Behavioural Biology, 18: 263-272
Strickler and Shull (2014). An owner survey of toys, activities, and behavior problems in indoor cats Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 9 (5): 207-214
Hall, Bradshaw and Robinson (2002). Object play in adult domestic cats: the roles of habituation and disinhibition. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 79:263-271
Thorndyke (1898). The Animal Intelligence, An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals. New York
Because the weather was too hot some time ago. I heard that the British Library has air conditioning. So I got a library card at the British Library and looked for references in it to support my research.
This is a great opportunity to find some books on animal behavior or cat behavior. As these relate to the biology part, they are very foreign to me. I need to refer and find more information.
I took pictures of the parts I needed and put them in this blog. Below is my borrowing list.
John Alcock, Animal behavior. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, [2019]
This is the first book I have borrowed, because it is in the British Library, so I got it on the same day.
This book is a very good book on ethology. But unfortunately, it’s not very useful to me.
This book describes the entire study of animal behavior in detail, starting with Darwin’s origin of species, and lists many animal behaviors later. Such as animal sociality, communication, breed, migration, etc. The animals involved range from mammalian monkeys, wolves, and birds, to fish, bees and more.
It is because this book is too detailed for the study of the whole animal behavior. So there are few parts that I can use. But there is no denying that this book is a very good book.
Next up are two books about Ragdolls.
These two books are very detailed about the origin of this breed of Ragdolls, as well as detailed information on appearance characteristics, hair color, etc., which are very useful to me.
Since I have Ragdolls, I found a very good cat rig on the Internet, but I need to make his own fur for him. So I need to know a lot about the appearance and hair characteristics of Ragdoll cats. These two books solved my problem perfectly.
Karen Leigh Davis, Ragdoll cats : everything about purchase, nutrition, health care, grooming, behavior, and showingRagdoll cats : everything about purchase, nutrition, health care, grooming, behavior, and showing. Hauppauge, NY : Barron’s, c1999.
with full-color photographs ; illustrations by Tana Hakanson Monsalve.
Next, I want to find a few books about cat behavior, but I am not very lucky, and the books I found are not very useful. And these two books are so old that they don’t even have covers.
Carole C. Wilbourn, The inner cat : a new approach to cat behavior. New York : Stein and Day, 1978.
This book is not very useful for my project.
This book is more about some stories of the author and his cat living at home, so the book has little academic value. More of an essay than a book devoted to cat behavior. I was deceived by the title of this book. Although very interesting.
Paul Leyhaysen, Cat Behavior : The Predatory and Social Behavior of Domestic and Wild Cats. N.Y. : Garland STPM Pr., 1979.
When I read this book, it was very late, so I didn’t have enough time to finish the book.
Much of this book is devoted to the hunting behavior of cats. So I thought, if this book was discovered and read while I was working on my last project, it would be very appropriate.
