#valcari

[infin-8-morphosis]

[transmandrake]

Fun question. Since the Valks are proper aliens now and of course I made them have 3 fun sexes that don't really match any of ours except in biological terms, I come across an annoying problem where, since some characters have 'woman' pronouns that people apply humany 'woman' terms and notions to them that is super grating. This happens to basically any character but, I have the advantage of having to make up a pronoun for the '3rd' sex anyway, so...

Which is better, trans swag pronouns or all new pronouns?

1. I like this because its super fun to introduce a character who by human terms looks extremely masculine and calling them she because thats the female sex for them. Even funner to double this up with actually trans characters to explore gender expression and such with aliens. But again, people just default to humaning. Which gets sillier the more characters there are. Also layers with me giving them human names as translations of their conlang name for the english fill-in they speak, where theres basically no correlation between the gender of the name and the character.

2. Well I'm already making a new pronoun for the '3rd' gender, it seems a bit odd for them to be the odd one out. I want to avoid people seeing them as 'man and woman' because theyre not, except biologically, which is completely irrelevant to a species that can't reproduce that way. It definitely forces people more to evaluate them as their own thing than put human assumptions on them. But I guess 3 new pronouns is a lot to figure out on page one. At least, for the average person.

Which is better, trans swag pronouns or all new pronouns?

Trans swag yes, consistency be damned, silly assumptions make it funnier

All new pronouns, alien gender cooler no matter the confusion

You cant do both but in my heart both are equally good

I have no opinion but want to see results

Voting ended onJun 12, 2023

[infin-8-morphosis]

An art post? I guess this is an art post. Days away from exams now but! Of course that means I have been avoiding the things I'm supposed to do which is good for you :]

Yesterday I was suddenly grabbed by the urge to design armor for my desert dudes. Blender is very soon going to become an advanced dress up game for me.

They are t-posing because, guess what, I'm basically done with my valkyrie (Now Valcari) redesign! Yay!

This is technically a specific character and this isn't a great angle to show their non-humanness... but! Symmetrical limbs! Tail! Wing nubs! Loooong neck! 50% nose!

I'm real happy with it. Sucks to be my comic but great to be literally anything else I make storywise, now I have a reference model.

They're a metre tall btw- for many reasons but mostly so I can justify Huge Monsters and trees n stuff. I'm a sucker for settings where the POV is tiny. This isn't quite that small but still. T-Rex to them is literally monster hunter proportions.

White is feet, red is metres (scaled to average height... this character is just short so shes only up to that first red line lmao)

This is only cool to a small subset of people who understand 3d modelling stuff but-

Mmmm

Look at that efficiency... you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like. Literally.

Jokes aside kissing UV Squares on the mouth... why are blender's default uv tools so bad. Hope you are good at squishy tetris cuz it does not pack islands efficiently not even a little.

As a reward for clicking, have a valc in flight mode. I want to make them seem plausibly flightworthy, so they usually have a butterfly-like wing arrangement. Their long neck lets them look forward much more comfy than us. Valcs who fly a lot have cuts in their clothes for them to pop out of, and wear a corset-like structure/neck brace to keep themselves comfily horizontal :]

Fun note but the beak on the armor above isn't an aesthetic choice, all their armor is gonna be beaky (yay!) because of their stupid huge noses.

[infin-8-morphosis]

Weekly Art Post #2

Let's see what I did...

Ah, yes, doodled one of the capitals, the desert one, Calabern, I believe I mentioned it last time. Not much to say? 90% of this will get changed if I model it anyway.

Ahhhh my scrinkle... can't tell you who this is but technically, technically, you could guess based on some colour symbolism and extremely keen reading of other characters already-outdated reference sheets. Point is he's the best.

You may recall the armor, but it's got a coat... mysterious, you will probably not wonder why that is. But look, look at how I can make his helmet match his emotions. It's so good

...Wow not a single one matches in colour huh. Decided on the green look in the end.

Wierd one but doodled how countershading should theoretically look on the valks. Not super different, mostly just that the chest would be dark as, unlike on a quadruped, it's lit up rather than underneath them.

Aaand beside that, a quick and awful practice at how the actual hell am I going to model their hair. It's actually pretty good. It doesnt look good, because I was goofing, but I have a sense of how it's going to look and function. Animatin/posing it though... hrrrrmmmm. I'm praying I can duplicate and join armatures to linked objects without them screwing up. Probably going to have to manually style it... Which is fiiine, I'm probably not going to use them as more than templates; the mouth is just too screwy at my level of skill to satisfy me. It's probably faster, and probably more fun, to use them as a template.

The neat thing though is, well, they're functional, animatable models I can use for, well, whatever I want! Provided they dont talk much. Or I figure out how to make booleans not suck ass.Or stop being a perfectionist. You probably didn't even notice how crinkly her mouth is.

Think that about does it. Well, it doesn't but between you and me I've gotten into Valheim and have already lost half a week to it. So I kept a bit of art for later. Yeeaaa