Megan FoxMastodon gets lil a contextless toon bird from our next #IndieGame, as treat
(btw, it lights correctly under all conditions, and I didn't modify #UnrealEngine source/shaders to pull that off, and why yes I'm very proud 
)
We've been kicking aesthetics around, cancelled a prior game cus it wasn't gelling in part cus we couldn't find a cohesive enough aesthetic, and finally: yeah, I really like this. Like a lot. Found a way to make the world vibe with it too. Ain't full toon, it's, kinda a middle zone. We're trying something new, kinda steering clear of the couple of stereotypical looks folks settle on because (it's really hard to not land on them due to general rendering engine limitations).
What you typically call "Painterly" in video games is, effectively, Impressionism.
What we're doing? Nearest neighbor would be, rather, Expressionism.
🌈 Andrew ☄️
Rune Skovbo Johansen@glassbottommeg Cute little fellow! Though for some reason I can’t help seeing it as a smaller bird in a large bird suit. Something to do with the legs and maybe proportions, or possibly the center of gravity not appearing to be above the legs?
@runevision (that is a smaller bird, heh)
Oh! It's probably the backdrop making this read human scale. Cus this is just the default Unreal model previewer.
@glassbottommeg Ah, no I meant proportions of different body parts of the bird compared to each other, though I can't put my finger on in which way exactly. Were any real-world birds an inspiration for this one? I'd be curious to have a look.
@runevision sand pipers
@glassbottommeg Ah right, I can see that now. :) Ok, after studying sandpiper images, I’m pretty sure what gives me the “bird suit” feeling is that the feet of the model appear somewhat small compared to the head and body size. Like e.g. a Mickey Mouse mascot where the human size hands seem small compared to the oversized head. Of course, everything is a valid style etc. just sharing my impressions as a data point in case it might be of use.