WhiteflameK
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Photomanip TF - Squirrel TF Sequence
🕑 Added 2022-06-30 00:09:28 +0000 UTCThis was a huge undertaking. I particularly like how the tail growth came out. Thanks to Transfurmurr for posing for the sequence!
I wanted to go for a progression that wasn't fully symmetric and which captured the sense of shifting physiology, so that one can see the ways muscles and bones are rearranging and altering. Something I have noticed in tf art is that oftentimes progressions follow a linear pattern. In other words, when people think of a tf stage, they tend to think of it on a point on a line directly between the human and whatever they are transforming into. As a result, these tfs have a sort of "animorphs cover" effect where it doesn't really look like a transformation, but rather some kind of hybrid that is avoiding the unsettling shifting anatomy.
With this sequence, I was trying to go for something less linear, instead of thinking of a direct line of stages between human and squirrel, I was thinking more of an "arc", that is, certain things in the body change a different rates, or that particular aspects of the anatomy change in one way (i.e. shrinking, changing angle) before changing in another (stretching, changing composition/cell structure), etc. It looks less realistic when one essentially takes a blended midpoint between, let's say, the skin texture. What looks more realistic is if the tf progression follows something of an indirect curve, where the skin cells display trauma, or anomalous texture, or roughness, patchiness, before starting to look like squirrel skin. In this tf, the skin becomes saggy and rubbery. Underneath squirrel's fur, their hips/upper legs and upper arms are essentially inside the same skin as their chest and body, and the skin is actually larger in volume than the body itself so that when the leg moves, it pulls upon the squirrel's torso skin and stretches it out, or remains wrinkled when hunched over. You can see that here with a hairless squirrel http://dvo53oxmpmca8.cloudfront.net.....smDSC_7718.jpg . The fur actually covers up the folds of excess skin that allow the leg to move within the torso's skin. So with the human turning squirrel, rather than have the skin maintain its same volume around the body, as the human form starts to shrink, the skin shrinks at a slower pace because it is larger proportionally to the body than the human skin is. Essentially, they start shrinking inside their skin faster than their skin is changing, so you can start to see folds of wrinkled skin start to build up at their torso, which their hips and knees will end up sliding under. You can see this between the 2nd-4th stages. In the second stage, you can also see how the left hip is asymmetrically changing and reorienting the leg, the foot stretching longer already, while the right leg and hip hasn't change yet. This asymmetric change conveys more physical motion in the tf and gives a sense of a dynamic and realistic change because you can see where the body part came from and where it is going in the same image by taking advantage of the left and right sides of the body changing at different rates.
If you look at the head progression, it definitely follows this "arc" progression. Essentially, some of the body shrinks before the head does, because proportionally squirrels have larger heads relative to their bodies than humans do. If you look at the size of the eyes, they actually change very little in size, but they appear to be "growing bigger" because the head is also shrinking proportionally to the body, but at a slower rate since the body needs to shrink more to change the proportions. I also imagined that such things like the back/spine changing its arch and flexibility might be something that happens earlier while the back is still more human before the back actually starts to resemble a squirrels. This arc progression is something I would like to see more of in tf art, so one can treat this sequence as a sort of study in how, in terms of linear time progression, the body is changing at the same pace from one moment to the next, but in terms of individual aspects of anatomy, the parts of the body are all changing at different rates, or they may move in a direction that first realigns in one way before realigning in another. For example, in a horse tf, I imagine that when the hips go from bipedal to quadrupedal, it would be a direct linear sequence from *human pelvis* to *horse pelvis*. The pelvis might actually distort quite a bit and end up looking quite alien and neither human nor horse as parts of it need to move around in the most efficient way before reshaping more to a horse pelvis. In the case of this squirrel tf, the tail follows such a progress. First the tail detaches from the pelvis and stretches out of the lower back. It has no "squirrelness" but looks like what a proto-tail on a hominid might look like which disappeared with evolution. Then the tail starts to grow further, and it doesn't really resemble a squirrel yet, but kind of humanoid and almost reptilian, but it has a kind of tensile arch upwards like squirrel tails tend to have while resting. This way it seems to be both human, squirrel, and neither human-nor squirrel, rather than appearing as only one or the other, which makes a tf seem less lifelike. At the third image, the tail is starting to thin out finally and take on a more species specific form, but the tf victim is holding it forward. You can now see the way the spine itself is changing to accommodate both the shifting posture, and the tail. And finally by the 4th stage, the tail is now looking more squirrel than human.
