Anatomy style choices: What's your?

[FOX-POP]

I found a topic on the FA forum, talking about anatomy and style... it was about "how much good should the anatomy be"... but it also made me think about how do we re-work over the human anatomy details for our own furry style! Any artist, for example, keeps a certain human-animal ratio, depending on the details! Human hands and feet... with pads, without pads or with plain skin... digi legs or plantigrade legs... more human-like or animal-like... human-based heads with animal traits or viceversa...
Talk me about yours!

My main style has a "60-70% human | 40-30% animal" ratio:

• Plantigrade legs.
Many furry artists or lover won't love this (lol jk) but... dunno! digi legs on two-leg-standing characters is physically impossible or too hard to keep as a normal pose, so... digitigrade legs, with human-like shape (as for the arms)

• Animal-like face.
This makes a good contrast to not make the style too human-like! Disney's Robin Hood and many other anthro cartoons (including japanese kemonos) influenced me a lot on this! An example of "human-like head with animal traits" is Blacksad (I freakin love that style tho'! :'D)

• Bare skin under hands and feet.
I once used to draw nothing, then I decided to remove the fur and leaving bare skin under hands and feet. Actually, I saw arsemaus using this trick, before thinking to use it

• 5 fingered hands.
I once tried 4 fingered hands, but they looked too cartoony or too animal-ish in my opinion.

• 4/5 toes feet.
I'm still not 100% stable on this (and I'd reeeally like your feedback on this), but this comes also from different experiments. I once used to draw simplified 3 toed paws (as in many cartoons and in characters like tea stilton), but it looked too odd and cartoonish for a still human-like style. So I discarded this variation as well as the classical 4 toed paw shape used by many artists (including miles-df), going for a more human-like shape. I mostly draw 4 toes because 5 seems too "crowdy", complex and detailed and fits better an animal-like anatomy, but... I sometimes still try the 5 toes variation.

• Tail.
I just keep it! It's something that makes a certain animal variety different from another!

• What about avians, scalies or simply ungulate animals?
...Do you know Bojack Horseman? I just treat the anatomy the same way xD

 

[Inkblooded]

im barely furry i dont even like muzzles or whatever

 

[Mayflower]

I prefer anthro characters to have completely human-shaped bodies, except for their head and tail. I'm not even a fan of paws

As for the head, I like the cartoonish Disnay-like style. The characters should also have hair, as if they were humans.

As for avians, I prefer them without wings.

 

[Ciderfine]

I only like/care for good integral designs of caring quality and respect. What is drawn anatomy wise I don't care as long as its reasonable and not freaky or scary.

 

[FOX-POP]

I only like/care for good integral designs of caring quality and respect. What is drawn anatomy wise I don't care as long as its reasonable and not freaky or scary.

Right, right... it gotta make sense somehow, otherwise you automatically see it like "what the heck?" xD

 

[Silverblue_the_Gothbunny]

I basically just stretch a critter so it is bipedal most of the time. For most animals, this makes them digitigrade. I sometimes have hair as well as the fur, but not always, as it often seems weird to me. Sometimes I extend a mane texture to be hair.

I keep mostly to four fingers and a thumb, hind legs more often have whatever number of digits the creature would.

For most avians or things that use arms for locomotion, they have wings with modified bones for grasping, though sometimes I give them prehensile feet instead.

 

[Filter]

- Animal head with hair, eyebrows, expressive eyes, semi-cleft upper lip and human lower lip.
- Animal tail
- Human body proportions
- Hands with opposable thumbs. 4 or 5 fingers, depending on style.
- Plantigrade legs with subtle footpaws. Walking on toes when not wearing shoes, for a digitigrade effect.
- Avians with arms and wings. Yes, I know that the wings are technically an extra pair of limbs.

 

[DarkoKavinsky]

Don't fret about it. Draw exactly what you want!!

Seriously create your style and roll with it!

 

[Ginza]

I like very toony styles! My ratio is more animal than human features. Although, I love a wide range of anthropomorphic art.

Digi all the way! Although, I have found myself liking planti a bit more than usual recently..
As for anatomy, I like the more animal-like bodies, and with scruff/fur visible
large (not ridiculous) paws, ears, and noses are also lovely

So to recap on your specific points

hands- I like 5 fingers. Just looks better to me.
legs- I prefer digitigrade
face- definitely animal like
toes- I don't really know. I think 4 is probably what I'd choose, though I don't pay much mind to the toes tbh
tail- yes please! and a very fluffy one at that
uncommon species- I don't like avies much, if at all. I think griffins are the only "avies" I like. Scalies can be okay, but I really only like dragons. I love almost all ungulates :3

 

[Coal-River]

My fursonas are more animal than human. Always have digigrade legs unless the animal it's based on is plantigrade.

There bodies are more human-like in shape and the have 4 toe paws and 3 toe feet since I like the cartoon style.

The head temds to have muzzle but also eyebrows and hair.

 

[KILL.MAIM.KILL]

Absolutely no interest in canine or other mammalian anthro. Cats are alright, the rest? Meh.

Reptiles, birds, or something not of this earth for me, please.

Oh, and don't even get me started on nasty animal genitalia. Hell no.

 

[Sunburst_Odell]

I'd say my anthros are 50-50? Although very cartoony. I don't do digi legs; their legs are like those of a human, but they have paws. Their heads are basically like feral heads. Their body shape is human-like as well, and they have tails.

For example: (Characters both mine)

 

[SuperNaturalHorse]

Name:Electra. Feet:Black horse's hoofs and sometimes human feet. Face:Horse or beautiful human female. Height: 5 ft 10 to 5 ft 12 tall sometimes a gaint. Tail: Long and black sometimes poisonous snakes . Lower Body:Of a blue horse sometimes . Skin:Blue or pale human skin. Wings:Black leathery large bat wings. Hair:Black with sometimes poisonous snakes. Ears: Large horses ears. Eyes: Completely black or blue sometimes brown.

 

[Skychickens]

Depends on the style I'm using. Often times when I'm more serious I draw way more human anatomy with just some features (wings, tails, ears) or I draw more feral.

...actually even when I'm drawing cuter I almost always draw more feral.

Anyway when drawing more cartoony and stylized, it's easier for me to make something a little more anthro. I usually need to fiddle with anatomy to make things look stylistically appealing while ignoring my innate "that couldn't happen" and go more "magic okay?!"

Long story short: I don't draw shoes if something doesn't have plantigrade feet. I can excuse most other things but that I just can't. If I do draw hands they're five-fingered and cute, or I just don't draw fingers and go full powerpuff.

 

[Dongding]

I like them chubby and reasonably proportional in a cartoony style with simple details and more focus on form, shape, and consistency than with anatomy.

I like 3 fingers and a thumb but generally do the classic 4 and a thumb since it's easier for me to draw for some reason and make it look right.

Prefer digitigrade legs, animal-ish face, and generic simple designs.

Also yeah, Bojack Horseman-ing is a fantastic way to do furries; Feral animal heads on human clothed bodies is <3

 

[StolenMadWolf]

I go for digitgrade legs, five fingers, animal head with human hair, tails and almost always bipedial.

I guess I'm okay with scalies and avies sharing similar designs.

 

[ChapterAquila92]

I usually play up to the circumstances of their existence when it comes to anatomical divergence from the exclusively human. In my ITC-verse for example, where the known anthros are nano-augmented humans, the extremity of this divergence is dependent on how severely that nanotech affected them. Case in point with Eric Patterson and his brother Daniel:

From left to right: Daniel, Eric, Madelena
(Image source: [Link])​

The former, having had both more biomass in proportion to the dosage he was given and a more robust immune system at the time of exposure, was able to retain a lot of human-like traits to the point of potentially being mistaken for wearing a really convincing fursuit at first glance. Contrast this with Daniel who, having been exposed to the same-sized dose at such a young age, had undergone such a radical shift in his physiology that he's just a few steps away from being little more than a talking deinonychus. At this point, Daniel is lucky he still has dexterous hands with opposable thumbs, because life's hard enough when your physiology is not easily accommodated by most of the local infrastructure.

Of course, doors are still doors and locks are a challenge.

 

[lupi900]

I like the one's that more on the humanoid scale than the much more animal like ones. Which can be painfully creepy or bad if done poorly. like doing really fluffy female anthro fox in realistic style that makes me wonder why she even has boobs.

 

[ChapterAquila92]

I like the one's that more on the humanoid scale than the much more animal like ones. Which can be painfully creepy or bad if done poorly. like doing really fluffy female anthro fox in realistic style that makes me wonder why she even has boobs.

Such is the Uncanny Valley. Execution is everything when you're that close to the brink.

It seems from the comments on the Duke Nukem comic that a lot of people don’t really understand what Uncanny Valley is, or why it’s horrible and creepy and something no designer should approve of unless they’re in the horror business (in which case you need to push it to the limit). “Uncanny Valley” does not necessarily refer to things that are trying to be realistic, nor does it mean “anything you think is ugly”. Specifically, the term “Uncanny Valley” was meant to refer to robots, saying that people will like things that look like obvious abstractions of people, and people will like things that look exactly like people, but people are repulsed by things that look almost like people but not quite.

You can hit up the Wikipedia page on the matter for an in-depth explanation of exactly what it means, but I broke it all down into easily digestible pictures of how this all relates to design because I felt like drawing toasters and gluing eyes on lions when I got home from work today.

If we made a graph of how much people enjoy watching something move around VS level of realism, the “Uncanny Valley” is that dip where something is too much like a person without actually looking like a person for people to respond positively to it. It’s basically why Tweenbots and Arnold Schwarzenegger have an easier time making friends than the Japanese speaking robot mouth thing.

If you want something non-human to emote like a human, you can’t just slap human eyes on it and call it a day. Back in the day sometime in first year animation class we were doing four-legged animal walk cycles, of animals randomly chosen out of a hat. The teacher warned us that people who got things like cats and dogs were probably going to have a harder time than people who got things like bears and raccoons, because people are so familiar with those animals that they’ll always notice right away if something looks wrong. This goes for anything people have a point of reference for. I would assume that furry art wouldn’t be quite as popular as it is if the cute cartoon girls were replaced with realistic human-animal mashups, at least.

It’s important to understand the limits of a style you’ve chose to work in. Realistic designs have to move realistically, stylized cartoons have to move like cartoons. Disney’s Cinderella can’t make the same boisterous exaggerated acting that her stepsisters do because her design is so much more conservative than theirs that it would look absurd and out of place. When cartoony characters move like humans, you get that cheap rotoscope/mo-cap look, but when real people move like cartoons you get the Black Hole Sun music video;

Which nicely segues into the rule of uncanny valley that most CG studios seem to be actively ignoring these days, which is that things should only have realistic texture if they have realistic proportions. Personally, I really hate the idea that cartoon animals should have hyper realistic fur. It makes them look like kids’ plush animals made out of real animal pelts (This is a real thing I have seen done, there is no worse way to show off that prized lynx you bagged than by skinning it and making a plush bunny out of it). Peter Jackson is all excited to talk about his realistic CG Tintin movie where you’ll be able to see all of Tintin’s pores and hair follicles, but honestly, cartoon characters with human skin stretched over them just look horrible.

This is all really informal and I didn’t really have a conclusion planned, so I’ll just remind you to look at the Muppets with People Eyes tumblr every time you start feeling like Uncanny Valley isn’t all that bad.

 

[lupi900]

Such is the Uncanny Valley. Execution is everything when you're that close to the brink.

It only happen's because those type of furs to be blunt are ignorant of what humanoid mean's. Allot of very fluffy anthro's done in the more realistic art style. Do nothing on making the head/fur work with a human like body frame.

Reminds me of that one user at /r/Furry, who stupidly wen't on how my sona is a neko all because of no tail/fur. but when i said she still look's like female jackal no reply.