Finally returning to the draw prompts to finish up those pics! :U

In my first draft of this art, I focused mostly on capturing the basic idea of a pouty fox kit and a hoard of stolen cookies. There wasn't a lot of context in the scribble. For example, WHY is she grumpily returning the cookies? Are they spoiled? Is she bored and wants to steal them again? <w<

The concept of having to return stolen cookies is rather abstract, indeed -- making it a great art study. Revisiting the piece, this time I tried to tell the story with more depth and intent!

I made the environment more like a den or cave than a castle dungeon. The smol foxxo didn't necessarily dig this herself, (actually she probably stole the cave too...) but it's a handy place to store a lifetime supply of cookies. An earthen den feels more likely to be inhabited by a cookie-thieving fox.

By making the foxxo smol and the den vast, it helps sell the idea of an excessive number of cookies. The cave tunneling into the background helps add some wonder and mystery. How many rooms of cookies ARE there? The cookies, boxes and cart tracks get smaller as they fade into the distance. So do the lines used to draw them.

Compositionally, the cookie piles generally slope down, pointing at the smol foxxo. The piles themselves are massive, so the full weight of the smol foxxo's crimes is bearing down on her. I used the negative space of the ground around her as a rest area to help frame her as important, and to trap her in her circumstance. The basket of cookies is a particularly dense pattern, helping attract your eye. The somewhat regular patterning of the cookie piles mixed with cookie boxes at odd angles adds visual interest while keeping the eye moving. I'm intending that your eye should move between the deep part of the cave, the sign board, and grumpy smol foxxo in a little triangle.

To add more depth, I included cues that show a passage of time. The smol foxxo is loading a mine cart at present, while a full cart is shown further up the tracks, implying she already loaded that one in the past. The full cart is spilling cookies, adding a sense of motion. The signboard and quantity of cookies implies the smol foxxo will still be busy loading cookies far in the future. The todo list says something about Vixel's plans for the even more distant future... <.<

Other storytelling tidbits include the boxes of cookies, nibbled and munched cookies, and the train signal pointing toward the exit to help define where the mine carts are going. The sign posts are pointed like spears to imply the Official Decree will be enforced, and the sign is bigger than the smol foxxo, implying it's stronger. But don't underestimate her - she stole ALL these cookies once, surely she can steal them again! >:E

Here's also a version with more cookies, some brights and darks, and a cavey blue color filter. The lighting got a little muddy, but it still adds some atmosphere. I'd like to clean it up later so it's not so splotchy, but first I want to wrap up the other draw prompt pieces!

I've been meaning to study this topic for ages! :O Finally finished some research and distilled my notes into a tutorial format so you can learn about it as well!

All artwork in this tutorial is transformed, attributed, and presented freely for educational purposes under Fair Use. If you see a picture you like, go check out the artist! <3

Digitigrade feet offer some fun design challenges in worlds where anthropomorphic animals wear human shoes!

Plantigrade critters walk on the sole of the foot.
Digitigrade critters walk on the digits (the toes).

Furry artists often blend feral animal legs onto regular human bodies. The blending helps differentiate animal species from humans, and helps emphasize that furry characters are wilder creatures. Clothing, and shoes in particular, must adapt to the major anatomy changes, especially around the heel, sole and toes.

Some artists carefully maintain a higher heel position and longer sole anatomy, consistent with animal legs.

It's possible to find fully digitigrade critters drawn with shoes, but it usually feels pretty natural for them to walk around bare-legged.

When shoes are added, the heel position often adjusts with the needs of each picture and shoe style, sliding up and down along the leg.

Sometimes artists rotate the footpaw so the heel is almost a human heel. This works even better if the art retains notable digitigrade cues, like animal toes and claws, or the heel rarely touching the ground.

Placing a character with covered legs next to a digitigrade with exposed legs can imply similar leg anatomy on the covered character. An artist might use such cues to design a world with more human-style clothing or shoes, while still convincing the audience that all characters are digitigrades.

By carefully choosing clothing style (such as a long dress) and tiptoe-friendly shoe styles (like "high heels"), an artist can mix human and digitigrade legs together in an appealing way.

It's possible to use anatomy that barely deviates from human legs. Here the tall boot design, small paw size, and feral-shaped toe impressions can help sell the idea of digitigrade legs.

Footware Form and Function

When designing shoes for digitigrades, form vs function can create some huge differences.

These shoes feel like a natural adaptation of real world sneakers. Practically speaking, the tread on the heel would rarely touch the ground. However, the emphasis on recognizable form creates an appealing aesthetic.

This fennec's shoes are entirely about function - keeping its pawpads from toasting on the hot sand. Shoes that only cover digitigrade toes are great for cute pics! But tiny shoes might lessen the impact of certain designs. What if we needed battle boots?

Here's what purely functional digitigrade sneakers look like. Very kawaii~! (endearingly cute and tiny)

Some shoe styles are naturally interchangeable with human or digitigrade legs, but these styles are rare.

The differences between human and animal leg anatomy can be further explored by adding interesting new shoe function, like the armor instep plates below.

Is there a "right way" to design?

When designing digitigrade shoes, there's no "one size fits all" approach. (badum tish)

How grounded in animal character an artist chooses to make their digitigrade legs, is up to artistic preference. That decision heavily influences shoe designs.

It's important for the artist to consider if the heel anatomy should always be the same, or if it can be adapted scene by scene. Keeping anatomy consistent from image to image can add a certain level of authenticity to the universe. Adaptive anatomy can be just as strong, so long as there's consistency expressed elsewhere.

Human apparel is designed for human needs, and digitigrade creatures may have different needs. Showing extra care in creating species-appropriate designs can add depth to worldbuilding.


These shoes feel sturdy, protective and rigid, with spiked steel toes for kick attacks.

These shoes have conforming no-slip insoles between the toes, and open-backed heels for fuller range of motion.

These shoes feel multipurpose, and leave toes exposed for natural use of claws.

Function-oriented design may occasionally create unrecognizable shoes. The audience still needs to recognize shoes as shoes, instead of accidentally seeing them as a new cybernetic body part.

But that said, as the audience becomes immersed in your world, they will soon learn the 'language' of your shoe designs. And function focused shoe designs can be pretty cool.

Form-oriented design creates more opportunities for recognizable, but impractical shoes. A great example being the earlier sneakers with traction heels that never touch down.

Either approach can work well, because believable and recognizable are both anchored in reality - it's up to the artist to determine which traits to emphasize.


Shoe designs might also be simplified more like socks, with materials being pliable or nondescript, to intentionally avoid any extreme designs.

One can also step back and ask the question: does a digitigrade world even need shoes? Consider that shoes with soles are covering animal pawpads, hooves or talons - which in the real world typically don't need additional coverings.

Going shoeless totally works because it's *also* anchored in reality (real world animal behavior). Personally, bare paws make more sense in an organic naturalistic environment, but less sense when characters will walk on abrasive surfaces like concrete; in situations where shoes would provide competitive advantage like metal floors in a sci fi war zone; or in extreme locations where animals normally wouldn't go, like lava flows. It's up to the artist, and the physics of their world.

To keep the characters from feeling half naked, cuffs and leg wraps can add ornamentation and help take the place of shoes.

Art style plays a role as well. Toonier and more symbolic drawings can get away with certain design choices, whereas realistic drawings must take care to avoid breaking audience immersion.

Believable shoe designs might incorporate traits that provide a competitive advantage or equalize the playing field. A warrior canine in a world of vicious gryphons might seek out shoes with shin armor and heel spurs to improve his chances of survival.

How do real animals use their paws, toes and heels? How do they bend and flex? Shoe designs shouldn't restrict that range of motion, unless restricting it is the goal. <.<

3d clothing proved to be surprisingly tricky in that fox treadmill animation from my previous post! :O

The biggest issue was something known as "Poke Through". This is where 3d clothes don't perfectly fit and the character model becomes visible underneath.

Pokethrough usually shows up when the character starts moving and the clothes try to follow and deform to the motion. It's a common problem for game engines or 3d tools like Daz Studio that try to support an interchangeable wardrobe that fits a base character.

Why does it happen?

Clothes are weight-painted to deform exactly the same amounts as the character. The exact same character rig moves the clothes the same distances as the character. But somehow, pokethrough still happens! :O

Take a look at how much geometry there is for the clothing, compared to the character. (The clothing is much more dense.)

Turns out, the deformation math produces a different outcome for the character and her clothing, since all the vertexes start in different places. There's no way to weight paint it to work for all poses. Sometimes it'll overshoot, sometimes it'll undershoot.


How can we fix it?

My first idea was to fix it with masks. I can select a group of vertices and add a Mask modifier to show or hide them depending on if they're covered with clothing. This leaves a physical hole in the character model - there's *no* geometry visible underneath clothes.

This approach improves pokethrough for some poses, but not *all* poses. When the character moves, you can sometimes see right through her! Or else, pokethrough still happens at the edge of the mask where character and clothing geometry intersect.

A better way to fix it is to use the sculpt tool to inflate the clothing slightly. Then it's technically lifted off her body, but it's hard to tell when zoomed out. I step through the animation frame-by-frame, and fix pokethrough on each frame.

Inflating the clothes is delicate, because it can introduce strange wrinkles or bulges, or make clothes appear to be floating around the character. Inflating too much quickly makes gym shorts look like a diaper, for instance. >w>

I haven't found a quick fix that works for extreme close ups. I figure I'll have to manually align the clothing verts to the character verts so their positions are precisely the same, and then inflate the middle areas of the clothing to move them off the body. I'll cross that bridge when I get there! ^.^

Heya floofs!! <3 Finally got an update ready! Sorry these have been so delayed. This month has been frantic. x.x

To culminate my HDRI explorations, I wanted to do one more study to mix physical lighting with the faux lighting from an HDRI background. I chose a sci-fi theme for this one, something dark and moody and a bit more cinematic!


Confrontation. A shadowy, menacing figure approaches with lightsaber extended, as if to strike the viewer down. Is this warrior a friend in the force, or a devil of the dark side? An iconic Alliance starfighter in the background adds ambiguity, reflecting the blade of red, while the cold and barren base station surround offers nothing in the way of an escape route. Looks like a duel is imminent - may your training serve you well, apprentice!


This scene is composed of four main parts:

Incidentally, the x-wing fighter was an experiment of its own. It was a chance to quickly explore the workflow for importing a generic textured 3d model downloaded from the internet into Daz 3d, and applying Iray material shaders to give it the physical lighting properties (kind of a chrome metal reflectivity) needed for the scene. This was easier than I thought and opens up nice possibilities getting Blender and Unity assets into Daz for Iray renders, etc.

I chose a really strong blur effect to emphasize the lights and darks in the background, integrate the mismatched HDRI, create a sense of distance, and bring attention to the only area in focus - the mystery knight. The x-wing, along with being a source of confusion as to the motive of this character, works well with the horizon line to create an X shaped composition with a lot of sharp angles radiating into the focal point. To keep the art feeling energetic and active, I added some zoom blur which kind of acts like subliminal anime action lines. Finally I used a canted camera angle (rotated, off balance camera) to up the tension & give the sense there's something not quite right about this character.


Turns out, Iray gets stupidly slow with a big scene and a lot of reflective surfaces to calculate light bounces. Add in the depth-of-field calculations which blur the picture incrementally, and I ended up with the final render taking about 1 hour 45 minutes to complete. Iray gobbled 3.349 GB of graphics memory to store 180 bitmaps for the scene, and my computer got nice and toasty cranking this out. (It was more or less unusable during this render, so I walked off and did housework.)

When composing the scene, positioning stuff in the Daz viewport with Iray enabled turned out to be impossible - moving any object took my computer about 15-30 seconds to refresh the viewport. I had to work in texture and wireframe view to pose and position things, run a test render for a few minutes to see how it really looked with scene lighting active, cancel it out and make tweaks, rinse & repeat until I was happy with the result. In a future study I'll look into render optimizations to try and make it easier to work with large-scale scenes like this.

In the end, I actually made a second render without the HDRI because I made the depth-of-field too strong in the first render, and some of the HDRI driven colors got muddy. Then I combined both renders in post processing and bumped up the colors, contrast, lighting and zoom blur in Luminar and Photoshop.

That's all for tonight! Got something a little different coming up next, after I get a good sleep. ^w^

Hey again floofs!!

Someone asked what software I use for my art, and it's a great opportunity to make a list!! Here you go. :}}


-- 2d art --

Photoshop CS5
This is my favorite art program! (Mostly because I grew up with it.) I'm lucky enough to have the CS version as a perpetual license, since the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription can get expensive without a student discount. Photoshop works great for painting with stamp brushes, and pressure sensitivity if you have a drawing tablet. IMO it doesn't simulate real media well (like dripping and wet paints, smearing, watercolors), though it's still possible to get results with that visual aesthetic if you know how to cheese it. A good all around paint program. Nice for post processing since correction layers are nondestructive, so effects can be dialed up or down without changing the underlying art. Terrible for animation and pixel work. Tablet recommended, but I can actually draw with a mouse in this app.

Clip Studio Paint EX - https://www.clipstudio.net/en/
This is a very close second for favorite art program! This can do stamps, real media, inking, perspective rulers, and even basic 3d models import and posing. It's the best tool for frame-by-frame animation and the best tool for comics. A little janky, but worth buying and taking the time to learn for any kind of 2d art. Tablet recommended.

Aseprite - https://www.aseprite.org/
Hands down the best pixel art and pixel animation tool. Pretty janky interface but not a steep learning curve. I only use a mouse to draw in it, but a tablet works too.

Moho Pro 13 - https://moho.lostmarble.com/
I haven't used this in awhile, but it's a very powerful tool for bone-based 2d animation. (Rig vector or raster art with a custom skeleton, and then animate the skeleton.) The animation power comes from being able to create drivers, which are bones that animate other bones - so you can do stuff like make an expression dial that animates a bunch of other bones to reshape the whole face, and then just animate the expression on or off, or mix it halfway with another expression dial. This tool is janky and I recommend finding a course on Udemy or some free Youtube tutorials to learn it. I'd also recommend starting with Clip Studio or Aseprite first if you want to learn 2d animation.

Luminar 4 - https://skylum.com/luminar-4
I got this through Humble Bundle. The latest version is called Luminar AI now. It's basically an Adobe Lightroom clone. I loooove this tool for photo and artwork retouching. It presents a bunch of filters with sliders that you can dial up or down to work on lighting, color, and fx. It's a little janky but good enough for my workflow, and unlike Lightroom, Luminar is a perpetual license which is always preferable.

-- 3d art --

Blender - https://www.blender.org/
100% free and the most flexible all around 3d modeling app I've ever used. It can do modeling, texturing, rigging, sculpting, animation, compositing, shaders, and tons more. Blender's been around so long and the community is so huge, there are plenty of free tutorials to make it no cost to learn as well. If you're interested in jumping into anything 3d, I recommend starting with Blender! You'll be using it in all your workflows for sure! :V

Blender can import a variety of 3d models, so you can use CG Trader, Smutbase, the Unity Asset Store, and pretty much anything you can think of as a source for free models. You can even get the extension "BlenderKit" (squeeeehehee >w>) which gives you a search box to download models for free and auto-import them into your scene.

Daz 3d - https://www.daz3d.com
I discovered this while trying to find the best looking humans and an attachable clothing solution that'd work for Unity games. Daz 3d lets you drop virtual dolls into a scene, pose them, and dress them with interchangeable clothes, hair, skin and makeup. It's great for making still frames for comics or visual novels, and the best tool I've found for making photorealistic humans.

Daz 3d is quirky and crashes a lot, but it's versatile for character creation using premade bodies, posing, and set dressing (ie arranging props). It actually beats Blender for these niche cases, and is my tool of choice for kitbashing (ie rapidly experimenting with combinations of props, character shapes and clothing) and for making physically realistic renders. For animation and all other 3d workflows, I recommend Blender instead.

Fair warning: Daz 3d is a deeeeeeeeep and expensive rabbit hole. The base software is free and comes with a few human characters and some clothing, so I recommend playing with that first to see what you think. You'll want a strong budget and some focused buying strategies to navigate the insanity of their asset store. I'm happy to give recommendations if you poke me on Discord.

Zbrush - https://zbrushcore.com/
Industry standard and the best sculpting tool for Windows. Janky as heck and expensive as well, though you can snag the Zbrush Core perpetual version for a lower price or use it even cheaper on subscription. I've used this a little for posing some of their base models, but I ended up switching to Blender for most of my 3d sculpting since Blender's tools easily accomplish everything I've wanted to do so far. (I haven't done hyper detailed sculpting yet and Zbrush will be better than Blender for that.)

Substance Painter - https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d-painter.html
Unfortunately Adobe got their hands on this one, so now it's an expensive subscription. But it's one of the best tools for detailed hand-painting 3d models. I'll be tinkering with this more the second half of this year.

Marmoset Toolbag - https://marmoset.co/toolbag/
This one is a specialty tool helping to make snazzy presentational renders and "bake" textures onto 3d models (ie merge lighting information into textures for better performance in video games). I'll be tinkering with this more the second half of this year.

Marvelous Designer - https://marvelousdesigner.com/
With this tool it's possible to craft 3d clothes, stitch the materials together and shrinkwrap them onto your 3d characters. The process is similar to making garments in real life. It's possible to make clothing for any creature, even ferals or aliens. I'm planning to use this later in the year.



-- Game design and misc --

Unity - https://unity.com/
This is a free, very robust and capable game design tool with a pretty huge learning curve. I use it because it can do 2d and 3d games, I already know C# (the programming language for it) and because it lets me write code just once to publish games to PC/Mac/Linux, web, mobile phones, game consoles and more.

If you've never worked in Unity and you're starting fresh, definitely take it steady and be patient since there's a LOT to learn. Despite how overwhelming it might feel at first, you can access top quality learning for free at https://learn.unity.com/ I recommend checking out Brackeys legendary Unity tutorials as well https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys If you use Telegram and want to use Unity to make video games, I also know of a large furry gamedev group.

Unlike the Unreal Marketplace, the Unity Asset Store is actually navigable. There's a zillion third party assets that help solve all kinds of problems or expand Unity's core functionality in useful ways. You can find a ton of free assets as well. There are efficient workflows to make game assets in Blender and bring them into Unity to quickly prototype a game. It's possible to build commercial games completely for free, publish them on Steam, and not have to pay Unity any royalties - so it's worth checking out if you're interested in gamedev.

Well known alternatives to Unity include GameMaker on Steam (best for 2d platformer or top down casual games), open source Godot (fully capable but community is still small), and Unreal Engine (state of the art but the biggest learning curve).

Obsidian - https://obsidian.md/
This free tool lets you do everything from editing basic text files to building a portable, offline Wiki with all the files linked together! Insanely useful for organizing stuff, in particular game design notes, world building lore, character descriptions, stories and anything else really.

Sublime - https://www.sublimetext.com/
A great basic text editor that works kind of like Obsidian, letting you have Projects with subfolders and text files. It doesn't do cross-file linking, it's purely to have a bunch of text documents open at the same time in tabs with autosave. The evaluation version nags occasionally but never actually expires, so you can use it for free.



Whew! This is a small subset of the creative software I use and recommend! There's also music composition, sound design, writing tools, productivity apps, video editing, web-based apps, and even more niche software within all categories. I have some promising new tools to try as well that might eventually make their way onto a future list. Boop me on Discord if you'd like any more info about any of these apps, or if YOU know some cool apps not listed here! ^w^

Heya floofs!!

This week I've been studying how to light a scene and improve render times. This is important for animations since I want to do complex characters and environments, but just have my desktop PC video card to handle all the rendering.

In Blender or Daz 3d, one approach to lighting a scene is to carefully place lights of different sizes and shapes and set the brightness levels one by one. It takes a long time to set up a satisfactory scene since most environments have a bunch of small light sources that all need to be well located and meticulously balanced.

In fact, the more lights I add, the longer the scenes take to render, as well! :O This is particularly true in Blender, especially when using Cycles (the highest quality renderer) with a lot of lights.

Why?

In a real world environment, light bounces around a lot, and most materials don't absorb all the light. Surfaces that reflect light act just like dimmer colored lights all on their own! The bounced light then re-bounces off additional surfaces, rinse-repeat until the last of the light is absorbed.

3d software tries to model that phenomenon using "physically based rendering" (PBR), letting artists create materials that describe visual properties of a surface: like diffusion, glossiness, specular, and refraction. During rendering, the software simulates light bouncing around the scene by "raycasting" a bunch of light rays from each light source, doing the bounce math at each contacted surface so we can enjoy physically-realistic and believable renders.



To quickly set up lighting and get faster render times, artists can use something called High-Dynamic Range Images (HDRIs). An HDRI is a flat image - often a real world photograph taken in panorama by spinning a camera with a wide angle lens in 360 degrees - combined in layers at different exposures.

This image is from https://www.willgibbons.com/hdri-vs-physical-lights-in-keyshot/ which is also some great further reading.

In 3d software, the HDRI is then projected onto the inside of a sphere, providing lighting information for all the objects in the scene. It's kind of like a "skybox" in video games - it's both a background image, and it also emits its own light.

Imagine visiting a location on Google Street View, placing 3d models there, and having them all lit with the lights and colors you see in the Street View photo. Pretty slick!

This scene rendered in 15 seconds in Daz 3d with NVidia Iray. The HDRI is from somewhere in Italy.

The results of using HDRIs aren't perfect, since light is approximated using exposure levels, and all lights are the same distance away from each object. You can't have a candle flame nearby and a sun far away, for example. It's also pretty hard to do background motion like animated water. But it's FAST to set up and render, and can produce some mostly-photoreal, stylized, or abstract results, especially during animation when things are moving around and distracting the audience from analyzing the lighting accuracy. >w>



OKAY enough technical background! I was curious what I could do with HDRIs, and whether I could make my own. I loaded up a stylized low poly Unity scene using 3rd party art assets and rendered out a wraparound image using a 3rd party screencap script. There's some glitching in a few places but parts of it are smooth enough to be useable. I've still gotta figure out how to make it perfectly blended.

In Blender, I set up the HDRI sky to light my scene and serve as the background. Then I grabbed a freebie aircraft from CGTrader and set up a very shiny, reflective material so we can see how the sky interacts with the material. Finally, I did a quick flyby animation with camera movement and touched up the frames in photoshop.

You can grab this in 1080p on Discord! (I can't attach mp4's here.)

It only took 1 minute 28 seconds to render a set of 250 animation frames in 1080p! Frames were actually rendering in .09 seconds each, so most of the time was saving out the PNGs to my slow hard drive. That's SUPER FAST.

The bonus is that this HDRI was created in Unity and looks just like the source scene. There are a zillion tools for prop scattering, level generating, terrain sculpting, art stylization, and more that make Unity a fast place to create interesting environments. I'll definitely be exploring this workflow further. ^.^

If you dabble in 3d and are interested in exploring HDRIs yourself, you can get free ones here!
https://polyhaven.com/hdris