Oh, I KNOW WHY! Rare video game tech knowledge to the rescue!
Animation of fur is really really hard, it’s effectively trying to animate, in real time, a few billion little strings. Noone can do that. Most consumer gaming computers would just burst into flame so that isn’t something people will do when modeling fur or hair. Instead, what animators and 3D modelers do in order to get around this is they form the fur into many layers of sheets or interlocking flexible bodies. Notice this animal has stiff fur, matted maybe from sweat or water. So when we watch the fur move our eyes and brains notice something we don’t notice on purpose. The fur isn’t moving individually, it’s moving in sheets and flexible bodies. There’s some slight movement and flexing, but it’s not “fur” like our brains want it to be, it’s “fur” in the way that fur is commonly animated! layers and flexible sheets! Also, light angles like this are common in animation to show the light being calculated across the body when it moves, so it looks familiar in the angle of the light too!
BLESS YOU
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such an excited happy reply to an info dump hehehe
While going through my drafts looking for things to add to my queue, I found this, which I’d apparently written but never posted. I feels like now is the appropriate time to do so.
I had a thought, and I am probably not the first person to notice this so please pardon me if someone else has mentioned this first BUT I am excited and want to talk about this.
So Umbreon’s markings look like a solar eclipse, right? And this makes sense, because the “umbra” is the darkest part of a shadow, and specifically during a solar eclipse, it’s the darkest part of the moon’s shadow, where the total eclipse is visible from.
What I didn’t realize until just now is that Espeon has this connection too! During a lunar eclipse, the moon doesn’t disappear. Instead, due to interference from the Earth’s atmosphere, it turns red, like the gem on Espeon’s forehead!
I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I’mma put him out of his misery.
The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.
Every once in a while, when I’m feeling down, I go and look at the notes on this post and they make me feel a lot better. This is the energy I want to carry into 2018.
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