"Take a wild, friggin guess" wrote:
>For that reason, while remaining humanoid, the new style
>bodies are not necessarily _human_.
So, new style your trying to achieve is animal qualitative
physical and behavioral values fused to underlying
humanoid structures. Animal, but not animal; Human, but
not human.
There are folks who do animal real life drawings, almost
picture quality. Are you pushing that far into the realism?
"Take a wild, friggin guess" wrote:
>I also wanted to work on skull shapes, since not all
>species would have the same shape skull. But I'm not just
>gluing an animal head onto a hair-covered human body
>(I've seen several artists guilty of that). I had to bear
>in mind that the cranium had to still resemble the basic
>shape for that species, but also allow for a larger brain.
Something you might want to think about as you ponder how
to render your new characters is the reason upright walking
humans lost their muzzle; Has to do with balance and head oscillations.
The problem:
A humanoid body with an animal head walking upright will
oscillate up and down to the point where the animal would
not be able to sight focus on any objects it sees in its
field of vision; also, maintaining physical balance would
be next to impossible as well. (The critter would fall
over a lot, making it an easy snack for a predator.)
This happens because the head is not balanced correctly
on the spine. To fix this problem, nature removed the
muzzle from humans, making the head spherical, which is
easier to balance on a spine with a smaller set of
muscles in the neck and shoulder.
A real anthro would need the extra sized ligaments/muscles
to act as a spring and stop any head oscillations from
occuring.
For illustrators who want to draw furry humanoid
characters, but wish to maintain a faithful furry animal
head structure with muzzle, powerful muscles and
ligaments should be rendered in the drawing, (at least to
some degree). Very few do though, but it should be
thought about as folks draw.
Something to ponder, unless you already have.
On another note, for fun:
Real world anthos are possible, but nature just didn't
go that path. My guess is since nature is lazy, she went
the less energy needed route and got rig of the muzzle
instead of adding the extra hardware needed to keep the
muzzle. Same with tail. A pity. I like the idea of being
a fox having a bushy tail.
Gene splicing might, one day, make it happen. Who knows.
"Take a wild, friggin guess" wrote:
>I think that's because I wanted to get the new style
>down pat before releasing it. Also, I would pick different
>"parts" of the artwork which I felt needed work, and focus
>on correcting those areas before moving on to the next
>parts. Plus, the mainstream material (while less
>enjoyable to draw) has helped immensely.
What to add into a character, and just as important, what
to keep out, is part of the fun in character development.
It can, (will?), drive you crazy.
"Take a wild, friggin guess" wrote:
>Another area concerned the pads on the hands or feet.
Keeping the paw digits to 4? Or expand to 5?
J Hooten wrote:
>A lot depends on whether they can still use them for all
fours running.
Ah, something else that needs to be pondered. Hooten
brings up a good point in character design. Somewhere a
critical decision needs to be made as to how animalistic
or humanoid they will behave. Did they lose that ability
to run on all fours for example? Rendering such characters
can be done, but it takes more work to make them believable.
(Jim doesn't watch t.v., but for others, Disney's
Gargoyles series is a fair example to view for studying
the mechanics of having characters switch between walking
upright and running on all fours. [Although the animation
in that series could have been tweaked a bit up. My opinion
only folks.])
It looks as if your putting in a lot of hours of research
into your new style. Keep plugging away at it.
Btw - Is Des helping in some way?
Received on Sun Sep 28 2008 - 01:08:03 CDT