He needs to be about 20% cooler

So I have watched Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

If the first installment was mostly material from the book with bits of new material, the second one turned out to be mostly new material with a few bits more or less from the book.

I get a distinct idea that Peter Jackson is trying too hard to out-LoTR the LoTR movies. Unfortunately, where LoTR was epic and faithful to the source, Hobbit throws the source off Orthanc and tries to lay the epic too thick till it gets ridiculous. Dol Guldur must be bigger and cooler than Minas Morgul! Dwarf king statue must be bigger and cooler than the Gondor king statues! Legolas must be bigger and cooler than... Legolas! Oliphaunts are old news, we need giant jackrabbits! Pulling sleds! Viserys Targaryen got a pot of molten gold? Feh, we shall drown a dragon in molten gold! (What, Viserys is from a different saga? Who cares, we shall still drown the fireproof dragon in molten gold, because it is cool. And have a dwarf paddle on it in a wheelbarrow first, just to show how cool he is.)

P.J.? We've thought this world and these characters were cool back when we had read the books.

There is no need to try this hard make them cooler. Honest.

I used to be an adventurer like you

You have to join the Guard now. It's the rule.

100 years of breeding

I've long thought that a lot of dog breeds suffered grotesque misshaping in the recent years, due to poorly worded standards. Recently it has been happening to cat breeds too. When you have statements like "nose as short as possible", soon the animal's nose is liable to recede behind the eyes - just look at what happened to Persian cats. Even something as innocuous as "chest wide and barrel-like" can distort a bulldog's body into something out of a freak show. Breeds like Cocker Spaniel, Chow Chow, Dachshund, English Bulldog and more have become caricatures of their former selves. And still, breeders will insist that a Pekinese's flat face, which nowadays often requires surgery to let the animal breathe, is "functional" and necessary in "a working breed". (I am not making this up, I heard it stated in an interview.)

Here is a collection of photos showing how distorted some modern breeds really are.

http://imgur.com/a/LVV1A

Perspective can be refreshing. It can also be terrifying.

Re-Ti gets an award

Re-Ti design got an Honorable Mention at the creature design contest!

Here is what they wrote about it:

Spot-on professional orthgraphics and anatomy make this creature easy for a studio production team to build, rig, and animate for a feature, game, or film.

Thank you, Terryl Whitlatch, David Bober and other organizers!

https://www.facebook.com/events/452193294886894/permalink/475657312540492/

Remember Tunnel 17!

I had backed the omnibus edition of Ursula Vernon's Hugo-winning Digger on Kickstarter.

And now the book has arrived. And a T-shirt. And stickers. And cloisonne pins. And poster. And extra dust jackets in case the book feels cold in winter.

And, of course, the pickaxe. Never leave your warren without a pickaxe, young wombats, and if you ever think it is not important, remember tunnel 17!

Oh, and I have a picture that I painted in the book, too! Thank you, Ursula!

The volume is literally as thick as a brick. You could probably kill a dead god with it if you accidentally dropped it on top of its black heart. And it is lovingly made, with clear print, appendices, and all cover images. If you want one of your own (and how could you resist?) you can buy it from Amazon.

Re-ti: creature design for Helpful Bear contest

Helpful Bear is a company at which Terryl Whitlatch works as creature designer. I have admired her work for years, so when they have announced a creature design contest, I decided to take part.

I know that I say I never participate in contests; but this one was not the sort where a company tries to get a lot of designs for a nominal prize. This was a contest by artists for artists, the reward was PR, and it was a chance for creature artists to get together. Just participating in such a contest is already good PR; I went through the complete list of submissions, and the amount of highly skilled and talented artists was impressive.

So I had decided to design something fresh for this contest, a creature that would be "readable" by us human beings but be completely alien in its anatomy, apart from the obvious biomechanics.  The  Re-ti was the result. 

 It may seem almost Earthly, but if you look closer, few things are what they seem at the first sight. Its "head" is not the actual head, its "hooves/suckers" are neither hooves nor suckers, its muscles can lock up in contracted position which enables it to use hydraulics for "pushing muscles" along with the more conventional pulling muscles, it communicates in two-voice tonal song, its hands were originally copulatory organs, it is neither biped nor a quadruped, in fact it is not even a vertebrate. Even its real name is unpronounceable for humans: it is a musical note D7, followed by sustained combination of D7 and B7 (hence the short-cut solfege designation of Re/Ti).

But it is still something we hominins could relate to. 

This creature is built on specific design logic, an imaginary Bauplan, if you like. I believe that  thinking of evolution of anatomy rather than inventing it straight away, offers more freedom for truly alien creatures than tweaking existing animals or combining their pieces. 

It is no paradox; nature always has to work with constraints, base its designs on prior designs, and reassign existing structures to novel tasks. If you set constraints for your creature and try to work with and around them, the result will be more natural, more believable, and in fact more creative than if you begin with unlimited possibilities.

Because this creature was developed with a body plan in mind, it is easy to design more creatures of the same phylum, which would be as diverse as fish, tigers, crocodiles, and birds. Here is a small sampling I generated in less than an hour:

The concept was planned on Dec 25, 2013 during a three-hour car trip to an airport. Most ideas that went into the creature had been devised at that time. Developed between Dec 27 - 29, rendered mostly on Dec 30 and 31, between other tasks.

The development sketches and high-resolution files can be found at http://chiseledrocks.com/main/concepts/reti . The contest submission is here.