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Anatomy & rigging et al
I see that you raised some criticism where you uploaded the posts. If you could be more detailed in how we could improve our models, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
And I see no reason not to comply.
But before we begin: no, I don't consider my own artwork to represent any mastery of anatomy or competent art in general. I'm particularly bad at hands and any faces beyond Sonic characters with snouts. I criticize my own art more or less just as harshly as anyone else's.
Anyhoo!
Character anatomy
This is all with default settings, no inflation etc.
General
- Many of the curvier characters don't just have wide hips - their butts are really big front-to-back too. This creates issues in positioning the genitals and tails, which are way too far apart. Many furry artists place tails much too high up because they (and their viewers) don't want to "interrupt" the flabby butt-roundness - this is a very bad mistake to make. If you can stick a dick between the cheeks, then you can fit a tail there, right?
- Please move character tails further down, closer to their buttholes. If they have to be enveloped by the enormous ass-cheeks, good - it'll make their big butts look fatter!
- Wolf currently has the best-positioned tail, and not entirely coincidentally, probably the smallest booty.
- Please move character tails further down, closer to their buttholes. If they have to be enveloped by the enormous ass-cheeks, good - it'll make their big butts look fatter!
- With the exception of Bunny, the characters with plump bellies have abdominal muscle definition there too. This doesn't make any sense
- Hooves and "feral" paws don't look good on too-human leg proportions. Artists draw them this way pretty much to avoid learning horse legs, and I presume Yiffalicious has them this way so that all the same animations & algorithms can apply. It may be worth creating new animations & algorithms if it means the more bestial characters' legs look better.
- Male Horse has the closest to good equine legs - the hooved ladies look pretty bad in comparison. If they copy his leg shape with mild adjustments, they can probably get away with it without needing to change any more than that
- The girls especially ought to have a wider range of voluptuousness. Their current shapes are at 0 on the bar - can Yiffalicious add a third "petite" version of each character, with their default "canon" shapes becoming halfway on the bar instead?
- Bunny has probably the largest ass and is the most affected by the wide hips problems above. Her nipples are too in-facing and aren't centered on the tapers of her breasts. In general, big tits should be pointing slightly outwards from one another unless leaning forward
- Cat's super-skinny legs with high-heel feet, combined with her thick wrists and hands compared to her upper arms, are a bit disturbing and insectoid
- Elaine's breasts look fake due mostly to her sharp & chiseled cleavage, and her legs are among the worst of the hooved characters - they're totally vertical & look like she is standing on painted human toes in socks
- Femboy fox has particularly awkward leg proportions for a non-hooved - his thighs look way too long compared to his ankles and feet. His tail is textured nicely but could be a bit more pointed. The small of his back cuts a bit too far in and he's very muscular for an effeminate character. ... Is he meant to have hair?
- Giraffe's enormous ass ties into the wide hips issues listed above. While she is a giraffe, her neck might be a little too long to be practical in most animations. Her belly is much too muscled for her plumpness. She competes with Elaine for worst hooves, due to the sheer vertical-ness.
- Horse seems to be in a strange midground between masculine (body shape) and femboy (face & hair). I think the "dark" coloration of his penis should match that around the rest of his genital area, and the skin at the base shouldn't have as clear a separation at full erection. His tail could be a bit pointier & more tapered at the end.
- Khana's butt cheeks aren't as large as her thighs are - this looks very surgical, and it worsens the distortion detailed below. She has one of the highest tails of every character. Her face is shaped a bit boxy and her head is really, really long (front to back). Her belly is also a bit toned for her plumpness.
- Rhino has no obvious problems, but I don't care for big fat muscle men. I have to skip over this one
- Wolf's neck is a bit large, like he was wearing a loose & long-necked costume head over his real one. His tail is shaped like a French bread and poorly textured compared to the rest of him. However, his tail is the best-positioned of all characters.
Model, texture, & rigging quality
When some characters lean forward / their legs are raised high enough (starting at ~45 degrees, well within the bounds of porn star flexibility), their lower bodies begin to squish and distort horribly - typically a consequence of rough rigging jobs, too few polygons around joints, etc.
Characters are pretty much always leaning forward or raising their legs in everything they are doing in this engine.
Due to the compression of the buttocks, some characters' genitals end up sticking out way way further than they should when leaning forward.
The primary sufferer is Giraffe (my goddess and center of my perceptions towards the engine), which may be due to her being one of the earliest models.
But most of the characters are affected noticeably.
To avoid spamming more images I'll summarize in text:
- Bunny: Seems relatively unaffected despite massive ass
- Cat: Noticeable divet in hips
- Elaine: Divet in hips
- Fox femboy: Divet in hips, genitals too far out
- Giraffe: Divet in hips, massive distortion on backside, separation between thigh and cooch
- Giraffe also has stretching & black markings on the undersides of her breasts, especially at max inflation - likely bad normals or extraneous faces
- Horse: Butt squishes horizontally, genitals too far out
- Khana: Massive divet in hips (see her entry above), separation between thigh and cooch
- Rhino: Relatively unaffected, mild separation of thigh & genitals
- Wolf: Divet in hips, separation of thigh & genitals
I've seen some engines use an obtuse system in which they actually create digitized "muscles" all over the model. The muscles stretch or contract as the bones move, and the model maps around the muscles, rather than to the bone positions directly. This usually produces much smoother & more natural animation and, being effectively a muscle simulation, allows for finer detail, especially on limbs. Maybe Yiffalicious can develop a similar system?
Comments
I'm not the designer of these characters though (although I do give input), so I will mostly just comment the rigging stuff. However...
Compare:
https://e621.net/post/show/114532/anthro-belly-big_butt-breasts-butt-butt_crush-domi
For keyframed animation in games, you have more control and can avoid such extreme movements, or you mitigate them by using blend shapes to ease the distortion. In our case it's a bit harder since we don't have any predefined animation, and can't just add specifically authored blend shapes where the animation looks bad. (Blend shapes can be used in some cases though.)
We are changing and trying to improve ourselves and our techniques though. Previously we've always designed our characters as if they were standing upright (in A-pose). With the Dragoness however, we're adopting a new method. We let her default pose be a middle ground of all her intended poses rather than a standing pose. This will reduce the "distance" to each potential pose and thus lower the distortion a bit. That's a thing we had to learn and think about, since most guides in game character development are tailored for other needs.
Btw, just wanted to show what 45 degrees looks like on the Giraffe, for the record (using our new angle snapping in the upcoming build). It isn't too extreme:
Rigs in video games are afaik more crude than that, simply because the resources are far more limited [than in film]. The more bones/definition/systems you have, the heavier the deformation calculation will be. Game development in general is basically about cheating as much as you can to reduce resource usage while trying to maintain visual quality. For most cases, bone deformation is enough. This is pretty much echoed throughout every video game and the technologies that tie into them. Just take a look at what the IK rigs expects.
The new render definitely looks a lot better (that and my PC is pretty crap and can't run the top render settings anyway, which may impact some of the curvature.)
I've seen a few fatties and am no twig myself, and those who retain a voluptuous shape don't have this bread loaf effect, which to me resembles a four-pack... on a "pleasantly plump" belly the entire thing is round and any folds / navel are mostly horizontal, whereas Giraffe and Khana have very chiseled and vertical details, which I've most often seen on lean anime characters and associate with fantasized muscle.
While I do understand that any model with sufficient movement from its default pose will inevitably see distortion, I also know this can be significantly reduced given enough polygons (at the cost of performance naturally) and if enough time and subtlety are taken on weight painting, to the point that only very intentionally out-of-bounds transformations will produce significant distortion... again, Bunny sees relatively little distortion compared to Giraffe in the current public build, but since I don't have access to the working model I can't really take a guess why.
To be honest, I'm not sure if a game or other application has ever used this muscle system in realtime, though I'm sure some fancy AAA PSx title has. I've mostly seen it as a feature of an engine in general, and I think it was Blender I saw the most footage of. I'd imagine it would significantly impact performance unless it was carefully applied and optimized... it would probably see the best benefit-to-cost ratio limited mostly to upper arms and thighs.
Thanks for entertaining my belly-aching!
Yeah, I started out as a complete novice in 3D when Odes and me got together and I did the characters as what I thought was "fun and stylized"
They've gotten both praise and criticism over the year, and that's all fine, some can appreciate that we have learning curves, others will have none of that and demand AAA-titled quality from two amateurs, no matter how insane that is.
From the characters that I've made for the poll's I'm not really pleased with any of them since I tried to take in a lot of input from patreons and fans. And most of the results was something that goes from a saying "A camel is a horse designed by a committee"
I read about that and realized that a pure artist vision will always be better for the end results instead of a lot of input that often is in conflict with each other.
As for the commissioned characters? Well, that's an whole other beast I think. What the individual commissioners wants, they shall get. That's all there is to it and it's end of story.
For the Dragoness, I let my own artistic vision reign supreme and she's the best character I've done to this date.
I don't mind critizism of my old characters now that I view back at them from a distance from where I am now, I don't like them either in many ways, but they were a starting point none the less so I will also view them with a kind of nostalgic fondness.
I've moved on together with my skills. I'll probably never get to any tranquil, ultimate state where I think everything I do is perfect, but it's the journey that counts, not the goal here
Anyway I realize this thread was kind of old when it was revived but I just felt like throwing in my two cents. And to say that yea a pure artist vision is definitely the best way to go about doing things. If not 100% of the time then at least for most characters made.