GR#097 - Musclecat - Feline Anatomy

[9_6]

I've been looking through old stuff and 5 years ago I was like


So now I am like

[Sharm]

Panthor got big!  This has definite improvement all around.  The pure black looks a bit jarring to me, there's something weird going on at the base of his tail and you need to refine some of those brushstrokes to get rid of things like wavy lines, stray single pixels and squares, but overall it's looking fantastic!

[Facet]

Much better structurally and also with the staging, great improvement.

The rendering and colours look pretty strange though; the original has a much better sense of volume and of glossy fur. The underside of the torso should surely be darker, your ramp is all pretty low constrast and over-saturated then jumps to black and the tail is a rainbow

Also, that cat is swole to the point of anatomical diagram definition which highlights the kind of humanoid-looking shoulder; feline anatomy ref. here.     

[9_6]

The original has its clusters smoothened out with midtones to death, that's how I used to work.
I don't do that anymore, I'll use as few colors as I can get away with.
Maybe 6 isn't enough this time.

Isn't that how a cat shoulder looks if the muscles swell up disproportional?
I've looked at refs (which are HARD to find for whatever reason) and if that mess of fibers and muscles blew up, it would look round like that, wouldn't it?
Fun fact: This is the exact same problem I had with the original too. No one could tell me how exactly a muscular cat would look like.

[Facet]

He doesn't look over-muscular for a big cat mostly, just shrink-wrapped. I think you might be confusing the bis/tris or muscles of the neck with the comparatively smaller deltoids; there's a nice, labelled diagram on wikipedia here

Also I don't think you need to add more colours necessarily, just define your large volumes better like you did in the old one and weight your values more towards the low end, bar the highlights .  

[9_6]

Alright, full-force grayscale mechanical volumes boring mode activated.
Here's what I get out of the cat and it's a goddamn mess.
I've been using this ref in which things look a lot less clean so that might explain things.

I really want to get the anatomy 100% correct here.

[Facet]

Gah, stop replying and responding so promptly, I gotta go sleep /joke

Ah, I haven't the foggiest idea what's going on in that ref. I'm no cat anatomist but marked in green above are the delts, and I'm not sure where your largest, bulbous muscle directly above the tricep is coming from. The muscles of the neck seem to take on a much larger roll, and by extension size, than in us bipeds.

Now's a good time to darken up that mid-range too

[9_6]

Well I think everything should be in place now,


The neck was too short and I suppose the ribs have no business showing through all that.

[Facet]

Awesome, We're getting into pretty anal territory now but it's definitely interesting; to me at least

I actually dug up a much better ref; a proper big cat and it looks like you might be missing one of the heads of the triceps ( top 'f') but everything else looks pretty much in place though the deltoids are still a bit oversized for my money.

Edit - Quick value example.

[9_6]

Would it be terrible if I went with that?