Eyes II

Animal eye lids tend to open much rounder than a human's. We have an almond shape from the lid folds. There's a distinctive 'wave' to the upper lid most noticeable in canines that is facilitated by raising the brow closest to the nasal arch.

Wings and tails

Wings and tails are the anatomical aspects I really wanted to tackle when I set up this blog. I'll make them more of a focus this year. All too often they are just added as after thoughts rather than being physically useful!

Aesthetics tails and wings that really don't do much!

Eyes

Carnivore eyes, those that are forward facing, are actually quite dissimilar to ours in many ways. I was looking at their shape when sketching and tried some rendering of them over the holidays.

Don't just create, build

Where do you begin? Well you don't have to start with all this detail when designing a character but I wanted something specific for my Troganite horse. It's the parts that make the whole when designing anything, and the saying is true that you can't build on a bad foundation, so even if it's a drawing of a biological structure it starts with a well adapted frame.

Banners

The old anthroanatomica banner is now retired after 1 year of service. Let me know what you think of the new banner style and layout. Many thanks to you all for looking and adding to what is essentially a debate on plausible anatomy! :)

Tails

Something that's puzzled me for quite a while now is how does a tail work on a biped. Lets take for arguments sake that we are retaining this feature even in some vestigial form. The bones that form the caudal vertebrae of any tail are of course that tiny group of coccyx bones in a human. Far from being just a human vestigial tail, the coccyx is the site for attachment for many important pelvic floor muscles including the muscles of the genitals. How then, could we keep both the functionality of the pelvic floor needed in bipeds to help keep everything 'in' as well as functioning as a birth canal, and the aesthetics of an animal tail. Would caudal bones diverge from the sacrum, or could the sacrum be formed to function like that of the coccyx?

A few sketched ideas on how the pelvic floor could exist in a biped with a tail.

Anthro leg structure 3

Following from the previous post... now that I know to turn Google image enhance off so that it stops turning all my images black...

Unguligrade legs on the left and digitigrade on the right.

Another way to think about the tapering limb as it becomes more distal is to think about 'muscular bulk', 'taper' and 'tendon'. We have the main muscle bulk at the origin of the limb, the muscle tapers down towards the tendon and finally terminates as just tendon onto the bone. This can be applied to any individual muscle of a limb (fig. 2) or also to the limb as a whole (fig. 1). Drawing a limb with this in mind ensures it stays in proportion.

The proportions of the limb are indicated by the measuring arrows. The set of legs on the left have a shorter thigh in proportion to the more distal, (further from the body) part of the limb; this limb configuration would offer the character the ability to run faster. As I touched on this in a previous post, a longer distal portion of the limb offers a greater stride distance and holds more elastic strain energy, quickening the limbs movement. The legs of the digitigrade on the right have a proportion of thigh to lower leg almost 1:1, similar to us as plantigrades. This would offer more limb stability rather than speed with the joints being less prone to stresses or twisting.

One thing to note is that the stability and speed configurations can apply to both digitigrades and unguligrades; it would simply be species and character dependent.