the pubic quandary

Normally I don't really do any long form discussions of any creative decisions I make outside of a post for a particular project, but I thought this was interesting enough to merit a discussion. Plus I like gabbing about these kinds of things anyways.

The other day an astute patron messaged me. They noticed how the moo in #17 - warchiefs had pubes, and wondered why I don't have pubes on my moos anymore.

Here's a brief history lesson. I slapped pubes onto my guys the moment I publicly debuted back in 2016 on Tumblr. I removed them from my guys for about two years after that because I was trying to emulate more of Rexx's visual style as my skills were improving. He never gave his guys pubes, and I wanted to stick close to his "look".

Well things changed, and pubes came back full time starting with #65 - welcome, highmountain tauren. For better or worse, my execution of "pubes" has remained  roughly the same since 2015 (when I was still messing around privately).

So back to that patron's message. Part of the reason why I don't give my furry characters pubes (moos, yiffs, rats and pandas some day, etc.) is because...they're furry and presumably already hairy down there through the power of your imagination. I always thought that slapping on these very human-ish looking pubes would look a bit off, so I've always refrained from doing so.

Then it made me think about how awful the pubes look in #88 - holy milk for one of my favorite shots featuring that lightforged goat. Always thought that the pubes stuck out so awkwardly after the fact.

ak0 on the other hand, has been doing a much better job than me with how he uses pubes. So I decided to study some of his best works with pubes (didn't want to ask him directly because I wanted to reverse engineer his process on my own), and came up with a new solution of my own. And that's what you see in the thumbnail: nouveaux pubes.

I think it looks a lot better. Without going too much into technical detail, I think it's simply a matter of scaling the pubic hair better so that it looks less awful. I could still make it really bushy or create treasure trails (like how ak0 does) if I wanted to, but for this example, I kept it neat and groomed.

Which brings me back to that patron's message again. I think with this newfound knowledge of how to better scale pubic hair, it could be possible to have pubic hair on furry characters again. I do anticipate some potential issues with ambient occlusion (specifically, why would there be such localized AO on their pubes but not the rest of their fur), so it's hard to tell if this will work or not until I experiment more on furry characters.

But for now at least, I think it's safe to say that I've managed to upgrade the look of pubes quite a bit. It only took 7 years in the making. 🙃