Another adventure in building Frankencritters. This time I was trying to build a unicorn that was closer to the classic description -- which is assumed to have been described by someone who caught a glimpse of some form of antelope or gazelle (the oryx is generally considered to be the animal which the person who described it actually saw) that they'd never seen before.
Which, in itself, is assuming that somebody actually saw some strange animal in the first place, and didn't just make the whole thing up from whole cloth to impress people. Complete with a sleazy little story about staking a virgin out in the woods to catch one. I've a strong suspicion that we've all been a little too trusting of such "traveler's tales". The description really doesn't hold together when you think of what one might have expected such a witness to have actually been familiar with.
In any case; what he described was a composite beast, i.e., a monster, which ultimately developed into the heraldic monster which we know of as a unicorn. (They are not horses. Probably wouldn't even be equines, if they existed.)
It's a mild puzzle as to where that description came from, since if the person reporting it was European, you would think they would have probably have seen or heard of deer at some point in their lives, and, if they weren't deliberately sending their audience up, would have described it as some kind of funny-looking deer.
But they didn't. They claimed that what they saw had a horse's head (i.e., probably narrower than a deer's), a goat's body, and a lion's tail. Which also raises the question of whether this clown had ever actually seen a lion. Or even a picture of one. As well as why they didn't claim that this interesting animal had a *donkey's* tail which would have at least been in something in the same general ballpark, considering that he was describing a creature with hooves, and similar enough to be readily associated with such. Well, never mind. The description is too widely known to ignore it now.
So, okay, we've got a Hivewire horse, and a unicorn, and now a bunch of deer, so I figured I might as well give it a try.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I started with Whisper, since the stylization was something that looked like I could work from. Er... not so much. I scrapped that and went back to the basic unicorn. That didn't work much better.
As soon as I started dialing in the mule deer buck all of the add-ons went haywire. The only thing that stuck with me and didn't break was the fetlocks. The unicorn tail became way too long, and broke when I tried to pose it. I did some scaling on the horse's own tail base and parented the horse's short tail to the end of that. Posing it may be "interesting" (posing a Frankencritter is always more interesting than one would prefer).
The horn broke completely. I ended up bringing in an unconformed horn, morphing it to suit, scaling it down and parenting it to the head. That at least isn't likely to give me further problems, although one never knows.
And the mane became completely unusable. It scaled down, but it couldn't be posed, and couldn't really be scaled and parented and have it work since it attaches to too many bones. I'm not sure that a LAMH mane couldn't be produced, but I've never done more than attach presets, and I don't even know if such a preset would work, due to the scaling and the combination of morphs.
By now I had decided to be more stubborn than the models. It needed a mane? Okay, I'll give it a mane. I gave it the lion's mane. It's already got a lion's tail, why not? It won't conform, but I could parent it to the head. It will be a pain in the butt to pose, if I even try to pose it, and don't simply let it angle off however it wants and be careful of the camera angle. And at least I'm not dealing with quite so many bones. If CWRW someday produces an LAMH preset for the red deer buck with it's heavy neck fur, I'll try seeing if that preset will attach and use that. I copy/pasted the texture from Whisper's tail MATs to the different portions of the lion's mane and re-applied the original transmaps.
I rather think that the Kirin's forked horn might be a better choice, but I'll let that rest for now. And since the beard was too thin, I've duplicated it a couple of times, but didn't do another spot render.
This is probably not complete, but I'm going to let it rest and maybe I'll get some better ideas.
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