Samuel_Tow

Good GOD, man! Please, never put blue text on a teal background ever again!

As for the actual idea, I very much like it and have a history of suggesting just that from time to time. But the current system just doesn't support what I think it is you want. And, yes, we do know a fair bit about how the system work. It's especially evident if you look at the texture packages, which you are actually not allowed to do.

Basically, each mesh piece can use one and only one texture file at a time, and some will have bump mpas and shininess added to them as additional textures, which are actually usually just bi-colour monochrome. What this means that patterns over costume pieces can never be other textures. Patterns are colour masks that allow you to tint a section of texture a different colour and is defined as a bi-colour monochrome mask. There is no way to force, say, a cloth texture to draw over a metallic texture (or at the very least no precedent for it). If you tried, you'd end up looking like you just painted part of the metallic texture with an airbrush.

Now, despite this, a few textures with both skin and clothes still exist, like te t-shirt or the tank top. The problem with these is that they're not clothes over skin, they're just one texture with both skin AND cloth on the same bitmap. Doing multiple variations of these with non-human skins, while possible, would both be seriously time-consuming AND balloon the costume piece dropdowns to unprecedented size.

Now, on the subject of skin under gloves and bracers... Yeah, I can kind of see that. It'd be a lot simpler to just give gloves and bracers a "texture" dropdown to alter the skin texture underneath them than to try and alter skin texture on a whole-model basis, though.

The problem with swapping out skin is that currently, Tights With Skin options work by using patterns to simulate clothes, and the only reason THAT works is because skin texture is relatively smooth and tinting it kind of looks like skin-tight clothing. Any detail you put on the skin, however, will show through the "clothes," revealing them for what they are - bodypaint. Any detail like... Nipples! Seriously, grab a bare-chested male and start putting patterns on him. You can't make them look like clothes with the guy's nipples clearly showing through the fabric!

Again, this is still a very good idea, and I hope and pray that one day we might get the ability to overlay textures on top of each other. That would be the ideal solution.

Welcome back, Tal. I still remember your avatar

Done.

A preface for the uninitiated: A digitigrade is an animal that walks on the toes of its feet, rather than on the whole feet. Real examples include things like cats, dogs, cows and ostriches, while fantastic examples include things like werewolves, minotaurs, were-cats and, um... Chocobos... When I say "digitigrade legs," I'm talking about the hind legs or quadrupeds, as they are what's classically seen as the so-called "backwards knee legs."

The reason I'm making this thread is because I want to see if you guys can help me paint a clearer picture of what a bipedal humanoid with digitigrade legs would look like. There have been many designs over the years, and I myself have posted pictures and screenshots of many of them. The digitigrade legs we have (the Moster legs) are... Really not something I'd consider to look natural, or indeed look good, but if not that, then what? That's the primary question I'm looking to answer here.

I don't want to look to nature for rules already stated for a couple of reasons. First of all, the few bipedal digitigrades that exist are almost all birds and as such have bodies that are pretty far from looking humanoid and, even then, their leg bones are too dissimilar from human to really apply. Secondly, while digitigrade stilts do very much exist for actual humans to wear, there are multiple problems with these. For one, we're build to walk upright with our knees locked, so we instinctively try to walk as close to that as we can in these stilts.

For another, human muscles are built for a relatively short foot, so digitigrade stilts tend to cheat, either by extending the walking surface back from the toes, by shortening the stilt by moving the shoe position down or by using bungee cords to hold the stilt extended. And even when humans do walk in these stilts, the problem is that they lengthen the overall leg size significantly beyond what looks humanoid, making them look like they're 10 feet tall with 8 feet of legs.

Personally, I'd like to concentrate on fictional designs, such as the legs we already have, the legs on the various Fantasy demons (such as those on the Heroes of Might and Magic 5 Succubus), or even those on giant robots (like Metal Gear Rex). So, with that in mind, what do you believe digitigrade legs should look like? How do you believe a person with them should stand? What would be the correlation of lengths between the thigh, shin and foot?

Counting the hip joint, the human leg has four joints - hip, knee, ankle, toes (counted as one joint). As City of Heroes handles it, the hip joint and thigh size are very much identical to those of ordinary legs, with the "digitigrade" part of the Monster legs consisting of an extension replacing the lower part of the leg. I'd call it a boot extension, but boots only extend below the knee, whereas these legs actually extend from the knee itself, which is held bent backwards at all times. This looks really awkward to me both because it's not a natural stance for someone with legs like these, and because it actually cuts down on the length of the shin in comparison to the thigh. Even in the few bipedal digitigrades (say, the ostrich), it is the thigh which is incredibly short and stocky, with most of the leg being shin and foot. The "backwards knees" themselves are actually ankles, not knees at all.

Personally, I would assume a creature like this would stand with its feet held much more vertically, putting less stress on the ankle joint in holding the body up, as well as less stress on the toes. I'd also expect to see the knee held up much farther forward, with hip joint actually bent forward. I'd also expect the thigh to be much shorter, at most comparable to the length of the shin and the foot. Being that I suck at artwork, I can't really draw what I mean, but I'd say the Succubus I linked to before has the right idea.

Now, I understand why the digitigrade legs we have here in City of Heroes are done as they are. With only the lower legs being basically a boot swap, the digitigrade legs can use the same animations as the more proper legs. And I will admit that it's true - I can't actually think of a single other game which features a digitigrade protagonist with this kind of depth and breadth of animation diversity. What City of Heroes does is the equivalent to the the Prince of Persia if the Prince were a Satyr.

This is kind of where this whole thread came about. Since it's foolish to suggest adding a brand new lower legs skeleton to be animated completely over again, I got to thinking if it isn't possible to come up with a mathematical model for transforming regular-leg positions into digitigrade leg positions completely automatically. But then it occurred to me that I don't really know what the corresponding positions to real-leg stances would be, which brings us back to the question: What do you believe a bipedal humanoid digitigrade would look like?

Thanks A couple of questions:

I came in here eager to talk about this, only to discover that I already talked about it last year, in the same thread...

Well, I couldn't cause the crash to recur, even with my camera zoomed in, doing what I usually do. At least it's not happening to me any more. Maybe I stopped doing whatever it was I was doing to cause it? I don't know, I hope it won't kill me in the future.