I honestly don't get the uncanny valley feeling most of the time, except with like gorillas and chimps and ancient hominids. But when people make anthros with proportions too similar to humans and just tack on identifying animal features, it does look dorky to me.
Sometimes with anthros its better to leave the head features more similar to the actual animal, though, or you do run into that, or otherwise just not try to impose human features on them too much. Like, when I was doing vutchnell and paklara, my line of thinking is, vutchnell aren't animalized humans, theyre convergent evolution of mongeese on human-like capabilities (intelligence, speech, grasping, and standing/walking upright specifically.) For paklara I went like a necromancer experiment; a mage turned some sea birds into a humanoid intelligent creature by warping the bird into the desired shape, not putting feathers on a human. So "what would these organisms look like if they developed along the same lines as humans?" instead of "what if human with animal features?"
Like for yours, maybe if their cranium were more similar to a coyotes; a slightly vertically squashed spheroid as opposed to the human tall and compressed front/back and left/right. Find a canine skull and coyote face photograph to use as reference. A thicker neck, attached to the jaw. If you increased its size from that of a coyote to a human, you'd be almost there already, you could just expand it a couple pixels. You could just fudge it and say their brains got denser/wrinklier instead of expanding, keep an almost- or entirely-natural shape for the species.
For the hair issue, I instead of going for humans' head and facial hair chose to go with manes, like those of lions or hyenas. The longer fur extends from just behind the brow all the way down the neck to between the shoulders for both sexes, males' "facial hair" is more the mane encroaching on the back and underside of the jaws. The color though should match the fur color and pattern of the body. If you want it to be different, it would feel less forced if it was a fur pattern that included the mane and surrounding features, such as backs of the ears, brow and nose bridge, down the spine etc, and wasn't just relegated to the "hair". Coyotes sometimes have significant fluff around their neck already, it could just be longer on the top and back of the skull.
I havent even started on my portraits tbh, im still working on the damn layered sprites one species at a time. Just did the gnolls (mostly) last month, never did vutchnell hair styles. I gave myself a huge menagerie of weirdos to draw and no skill or energy to actually do that...
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Topic: What's going on in your modding? (Read 266232 times)