Making Thundercats morphs for Daz3d
I’ve been working on textures for a while, but my notes are somewhere in the mess. What I’ve been focusing on at the moment, is morphs and textures for Thunderian style ears, and muzzles and cat-like noses for the few characters that have them. (… ironically I don’t need them for any of the characters I was planning on making in Daz). (To be clear, I’m only referencing the original Thundercats cartoon from 1985). I’m making them in Blender with some input from Daz3d, and textures in Substance Painter. Currently they’re for Genesis 8 Male, but they be converted for Genesis 8 Female as well. I’ll be offering some of it for free and some as a paid pack. I can think of a lot of anthro-type characters that could find the muzzle handy.
The best reference for ears is Panthro. A lot of the characters have their ears completely covered by the hair, but Lynx-o and Pumyra also have their ears showing.
So I made a number of morphs so it can be customized, but the end result can look like that. (For Panthro especially I’d also use a scaling morph to give him bigger ears, but those are easily available.)
I need to finalize textures for the ears. There are a couple of ways to do it in Daz3d including altering the base texture, overlaying it in Daz (makeup or diffuse overlay), or layering it in Daz (LIE). But that’ll come later, along with hands, feet, and face textures to get the light highlights.
But there are a handful of slightly more cat-like characters: Grune the Destroyer from the episode of the same name, the Thunderian Guards from the episode “Return to Thundera”, and Pumm-ra (actually Mumm-ra) from the episode of the same name. I’m mostly ignoring Pumm-ra at the moment, although as the Thundercats didn’t react to his different appearance so it must be in the range of normal for Thunderians, so I’ll be coming back to it in a bit. There are also some “ancient” Thunderians that show up in one of the last episodes (“Touch of Amortus”) but I’m completely ignoring them (they are much more cat-like, with lion-like ears on their heads, tails, and digitigrade legs).
Here’s Grune and the guards:
This is when Grune was a Thundercat before he lost a tusk and was exiled into space (and somehow ended up on Third Earth)
Grune’s design may have been dictated by the toys (I’m not sure on the timing between the toys and the cartoon), but I don’t know why they made the guards different.
Interestingly, if you go through more or less frame by frame of “Grune the Destroyer” it turns out that Grune has round ears. There are a couple of moments when his hair blows back enough that you can see his ears. I wonder if that was decided or if the animators just went with the “default”.
And you can get those ears with my morphs, by turning down or off the morph “Thunderian ear shape.”
For comparison, this is the default ear
I’m done with the ears, aside from the textures. So I decided to do face morphs, despite, again not needing them in any way. First I did the muzzle, because it’s much easier. Here’s the muzzle morph while I was working on it.
This is a single morph, but if you don’t have it at full strength the groove in the lips doesn’t match the philtrum so I ended up making a “fix” morph to help.
Another work-in-progress pic (with sabretooth from the no longer available EJ Teeth Collection)
(I think the skin here is Sanjay 8. The hair is Deck Hand Hair)
Making a cat-like nose was much trickier. I decided to do one more like the cartoon and one slightly more realistic. And then I did an adjustment morph to make the nose tall or shorter.
It also needed textures, obviously. Cat noses are subtly bumpy, so first I made what’s called a “normal map” which adds 3d-ness that’s not in the model. Also, if you look at cat noses, a lot of tabbies especially have various areas of black and that was easy to do.
This is in Substance Painter after making a bumpy texture in Blender. I ended up not being very happy with it, but you can see how it looks bumpy even though the 3d mesh isn’t.
This is my second attempt, along with one of the black options. I think we can agree this looks much better and more like a cat nose actually does.
Besides that sort of black, there’s also what’s called “lentigo”. In humans it’s most familiar as liver spots or age spots. In cats it almost entirely shows on the nose and gums: it’s a harmless increase in pigmentation (even though it’s technically called a lesion). It happens to some colors of domestic cats (mostly orange). It also happens to some big cats or wild cats - from what I could tell, it’s super common in lions. Not sure if it’s genetic or the amount of sunlight they get (for example, I wasn’t seeing any images of mountain lions with it). Here’s the first version I made of a lentigo overlay:
Cats also have a surprisingly large range of colors their noses can be, determined by species, breed, and coat color. I’m currently working on getting all those ironed out. I have the base colors, but details still need to be set. Future plans include sabreteeth with separate right and left options, plus length and thickness; a longer muzzle version; and more animal-like ears (you’ll be able to make Pumm-ra), plus the skin highlight options I’ve already started. I have nebulous plans for even more Thundercats content in Daz for original characters and charactes cosplaying, including hair and clothes (neither of which I know how to make currently)
To finish this up, here’s some renders with the current morphs and textures. I’m surprised how well it works even just doing it as an overlay.
Armani hair and FW Keyne skin, with my wip ear overlay and the nose color as a diffuse overlay
You really only need the normal map in close-ups but I think it does add something. I might be biased because it was such a learning process to make
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