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[Supermikhail]

A disk squashed in which direction?

Also, I think it's time for a musical break! A synth guitar piece with password Bay12. If you're a true evolutionist, you've got to know it! What is the name of the show?

To find out the correct answer, come back tomorrow.

[Shoku]

I was hoping you'd just imagine one and go with it but since that's off it's squashed horizontally. I've also pictured it wrapping around the gut to end up with a sort of donut shape.

[Supermikhail]

I feel that I shouldn't have asked that question. I've got no idea how to connect it to a donut in my head.

I guess that tune would have sounded more recognizable if I used the right instruments. Well, I decided to make it harder. And I'm not giving up! This article has a strong connection to the title of the show the tune's from.

[Shoku]

Moving things around to disrupt the shape of a gas bubble seemed like a stretch back when I first made the thing but it doesn't sound like it so much now. Fold the shape around a bit and connect the ends and you get a simple round tube of space in the middle of it (you know, like how I described out spinal cords forming,) and right like that you basically have a donut shape. If it stretched more you might end up with a pointy outer rim or maybe a star shape. Given that the mouth has three bits it would presumably be easiest to reuse some of that patterning to produce a three point star... with a hole in the middle.

I'm taking my hands off of that for awhile though so I don't go trying to give it a bunch of real world animal anatomy. I've already come too close to several animals I can think of.

[Supermikhail]

Okay. I've just made a triangular slimy-looking donut. What I'm interested in now is how this thing eats. I'm kind of hesitant to place the mouth in any particular place, and I'd very much like to experiment with its internal organs.



Update: What did I ever do to Blender3D? It refuses to be intuitive to any extent. Like, you've got to read a hundred articles to figure out each thing. "You can't do realistic water until you get PhD in shaders!"

Anyway, I thought, is it possible that these creatures can be found in other places than an endless expanse of shallow water? Like, some static, more or less regular, geometry. I don't want to continue with boring gradient, but water surface I just can't figure out - today I read an article that made me think that water surface has to be wrestled with using a lot of cheating - all cheating, actually, like, fake lights, fake shadow on the floor, fake transparency - well, besides fake waves. I can't handle so much cheating right now. So, what can there be there? Obviously, no lost cities. Maybe a volcano in the background? I've seen a tutorial for that somewhere.

Oh. Also, that tune was a guitar arrangement of the End Titles from Walking With Dinosaurs.

[Shoku]

Ooooooh, I meant the air bladder became that shape so the intestine could go up through the middle but still be "outside" of the organ. I gave it the dual purpose of nutrient diffusion so it can do that in place of the intestine. The overall creature would be fatter and maybe later lose the neck in favor of some kinds of arms. If you wanted ot make things transparent you could put that inside of the actual animal though.

[Supermikhail]

Whew. Alright, something like that?


Erm, I could probably choose a better angle. I hope the idea gets through.

Edit: I think I've got a brilliant idea.

In the Writers Guild we've got this thing with writing prompts. We could use something like that here. Basically, one of us comes up with a physical condition or a factor. Then we pick a creature/creatures and evolve it/them to this factor. You know, to make brainstorming more organised.

[Shoku]

Yeah, more like that. The actual gut would only have a little muscle and any incoming food to push things through and out the top so it should be much narrower, if nowhere else at least behind the mouth. It might be more effort that it were worth but it would be neat if you could have a thinner tube that traced a spiral (just like one circle worth) along the inside of the donut shape.

Not demanding you redo it or anything but the three mouth bits are supposed to be space filling- like they could move around just a smidge and grind anything that happened to be in the right position. So what I mean is I'm saying all of this to give a sense of scale.

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Yeah, I think I would like the prompts. I'm not quite sure how that works though.

[Supermikhail]

Well,






In these I experimented with the refractive index of the donutsaur's body material. Which boils down to eye candy, if you don't care for physics much. And I must say that some refractive index, like in the middle picture, looks much nicer than no refraction at all, from scientific and artistic point of view, at least to me.


Nevertheless, or in all their bliss, here are the overhauled jowls of the donutsaur, without the effect of changed refractive index. I tried to make them more manly, but a full render with improved transparency seems to have sort of undermined my efforts.

What I'm still not clear on, is how does the gut go out; you mean it's open at the top? That is probably related to that little muscle you mentioned; it envelops the gut, and pushes food through and out, right?

About prompts - one I'm interested in the most is about food. Some posts ago I said that my imagination got limited to the silt. So, it would be useful to have prompts which ask you to make/develop a creature adapted to some particular kind of food available in our primordial seas. Also I've remembered that you something like a prompt in the "beginning" when you said that there was lack of minerals for shells, and sea levels had risen. Something like that could be useful, too.

Addendum. Editing this thing with internal organs has become a little unwieldy, but that means that I've got a lot to learn (like layers and proper use of vertex groups), so don't hesitate to tell me if you think the donutsaur could use some actual muscle.

Eh, edit. The donutsaur doesn't have any teeth because it turned out that in full-body renders they are nigh invisible. So I didn't bother.

[Shoku]

I meant that the spiral was in contact with the torus- more surface area right up near the organ that diffuses nutrients should make for better absorption. I had pictured it doing this in the one part that you left straight but seeing it like this has made it close that pressing right up against the bottom of the torus would give more length in contact with it. (So obviously I figured the opening in the middle of the torus was wider.) Snaking around the outside edge of it would probably exceed realistic limits and really who would want to have a fragile thing like their intestines right near the surface everywhere on their body?

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Well the gastrointestinal tract is pretty muscular. You know how when you swallow you create a narrow spot and then the muscles coordinate in a way to make that narrow bit go down the length of your throat pushing stuff along right? I think out small intestine does something similar (though the large intestine seems more like a series of sacs lined up so that they can hand off their contents from one to the next line a disgusting wet ball until enough water has been absorbed for the final- well you know.

-

Darn, I was hoping for some more structural cues for how to do prompts.
The mouth actually looks fairly close to what I had meant before- well, here's a picture of a mouth with the sort of "teeth" I meant:

Really just lumps of flesh that are at the very least hard on the inward facing side.

As for muscle- well, I'm not really sure how you could show that. Just having shapes sitting inside the thing wouldn't make any sense as muscle because the stuff contracts so you need to be able to tell what direction it's facing. Human muscles are pretty easy to tell because they attach to a couple of spots on our bones and are fat in the middle but for something without bones it's just about got to be full layers of muscle running in different directions for anything it is going to have control over.

Edit: Torus is the same shape we've been talking about. Specifically it is the 3d shape you get from rotating a 2d circle through a 3rd plane (same thing as around either axis but it needs to not be centered or else you would just get a sphere.) Interestingly the old school RPGs that had world maps that wrapped vertically and horizontally make the most spatial sense if you imagine them on this shape.

[Supermikhail]

Wow... Thank you very much - I don't think I'm gonna be able to sleep tonight.

I've looked at some Google pictures, and indeed guts don't seem to require any muscle work, because on any transparent creatures muscles envelop the guts making them visually one thing... I hope this makes sense.

What is this horrible creature, by the way? My best guess would be a ribbon worm, although it doesn't appear to be very ribbon-y. I'm mostly interested in size. If it approaches the donutsaur, then maybe the donutsaur doesn't really need transparency.

[Shoku]

They're about a millimeter long but they're also transparent. That looks rather not-transparent what with being from an electron microscope. C elegans is a very well studied worm thanks to all sorts of things but I'm just going to turn this into an opportunity to mention that they have the same pattern of cell division every time so you know they will have exactly 302 neurons. Unfortunately we can't even simulate such a trivial number of cells well enough to produce their characteristic movement pattern and behavior (we can simulate the muscles easily.) Makes all those projects aiming to simulate a human brain look ridiculous (don't get me started about how screwed up "but our brain has repeating units" is.)

Aside from the organs we've dealt with so far the bulk of their midsection is taken up by two ovaries. They start in the middle then loop forward or back and come around to the point in their midsection where they lay eggs. It's just a constant stream of the cells growing larger until it's a huge cell and then fertilization when it passes through the sperm sac. Oh right, these things are hermaphrodites.
About one in 1000 will just go through the simple genetic even that makes them male instead. Males have a fan sort of thing on their tail end that they use to fertilize the otherwise fertile hemaphrodites. Not spending all that energy making eggs allows them to make enough sperm to fertilize virtually all of the eggs produced by around three not males- even competing against their own sperm.

Ok so for the nightmare fuel there are a variety of genetic defects that cause them to not actually lay their eggs. These worms balloon up to be rather fat and eventually perish leaving their offspring to slither around inside of them until such a time as their cuticle has enough of a break to allow them out. Whether the offspring consume everything inside or that is done by bacteria was entirely clear to me but either way crawling around in the mother's brain probably actually happens.

Less hellish visions include some nervous defects where instead of slithering they just roll over again and again. On a petri dish growing their food they can not only afford to pump out so many eggs without moving around but they can eat so much that they grow larger from not having expended energy. They eat E. coli pretty happily whether they're swimming around or not.

Also they can do a sort of pre-puberty hibernation phase where they survive for weeks without any food  or even in environments that would be too dry for the normal life cycle.

These worms do actually do a sort of pumping to feed- though that's done by having a long narrow tube with a largish diaphragm behind it.

The internal shape you see there is the pharynx and the little vertical bit in the rear bulb visibly flutters around.

Now just stop a second and think about the shape of our creatures. Isn't it hard to not just lift things from this?

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Something you can also notice from the electron picture is that to look at something so small you are also limited to a pretty narrow band of focus- through any microscope you could just look through these things end up showing you a nearly 2d slice of what you're looking at with a blurry mess above or below it. Setting the microscope up properly minimizes how much of that you even see so it is really just barely more than 2d. The two eyepieces give it just a bit of depth but more often than not anything so small that you'd need it casts obnoxiously differing shadows through those.

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So I think there are two easy changes in different directions the donutsaur could take.
Stretching it out lengthwise to produce more of a long neck. To keep the bubble near the tissue of the head or a potential tail if could have extensions reminiscent of a certain space station

Not so thin of course but you should be able to picture them coming off of the torus shape pretty easily.
Or stretching out width wise, meaning a wider ring for the torus while the head came mostly into the body to just have the mouth on th bottom of a disk shaped creature.

To spice up feeding habits we need a source of foodstuffs that's not the same as these free floating bacteria and the tiny offspring of larger things. After the long wait of the creatures seeming to move toward stable forms it seems fitting for there to be green plants to offer larger meals spread out over greater distances. In this case a greater distance could just be several body lengths away for the donutsaurs so it's probably time for active movement.

[Supermikhail]

It's mad! I've looked at the Wikipedia page for C. elegans, and there's a moving picture... What does it do, phasing its muzzle around like that? Feeding? Or sniffing?

What saddens me about the current situation is that you can lift stuff from these things... and I can't. I've remembered an old saying, "To break the rules, you first have got to learn them." This whole project is about breaking... well, not rules, per se... and I, for example, don't... now didn't know anything about these worms' anatomy beyond that they've got a muscle around them and a gut in them. And, I guess, one of the first centralized nervous systems to have developed on Earth. That's mostly where my need for a prompt stems from - the way forward for me is so vague, and I want just any kind of restraint to pull me in some direction. Like, the only tissues that I could think up would be gut and muscle. When that freaking primitive worm has got them all! This might be another reason for lack of involvement from the rest of the forum.

By the way, can you estimate (on the scale of 1 to 10, for example), how well this project is doing in terms of invented creatures, comparing to other projects you know of or have participated in?

Another thing. I wonder if there's some standardized way to represent anatomy of a creature, because, while 3D pics are very nice, I fear they might have stalled the overall progress, even if helping clarify some anatomical details. In any case I do them mostly on weekends, and if there was some faster way, for the rest of the time it could be employed instead.

Oh. Yet another thing. Say, if a blog was made to follow along with this project, what tags, or whatever they have to indicate the theme, would it have? Does this thing we're doing have some name? Like, "speculational evolution"?

Edit: Hey, that's not fair! Now along with being scared, I'm confused about that spaceship creature.

[Shoku]

That's the neat thing about the modern world though- everybody does things in groups. Instead of taking a lifetime to think of something like the internet a handful of people can just glue each other's partially developed ideas together and actually have a good shot at getting pretty much the same kind of result.

I understand pretty well why this is difficult for people but I also recognize that most of my thoughts on how to make it easier are treading down exactly the path I'm not interested in travelling. If you really want to spoil yourself you can look up the taxonomy for ocean life and just trace the tree of life till you've looked at every class branch. I've probably been through anatomy charts for all of those and really any time I picture any way to stretch the shape of these things or add on some dongle here or there I realize that I'm actually just remembering some animal. I think that there are about ten specific animals I've had to struggle to not rip off, and I can see a few on the horizon that I don't know how to steer away from.

But yeah, after seeing that animation it probably makes more sense why I called more of the burger descendants still bacteria colonies. The real mind blower though is that basically everything in you can think of from the ocean is that worm stretched and squashed to fit into differently shaped shells. There's just a handful of little body systems that haven't already started to show up there and honestly if you look around you can usually find a worm that has them.

The other places I've looked tend to have a whole lot more than two authors so we're fairly low on the scale of content generation. However if you cut out when somebody basically took a snake and a dinosaur then labeled them start and finish so they could draw fifteen steps between them- well you've pretty much already done about as much as I see most of them do. I think you could actually get a lot more variety by breaking up some of the extreme things like x wingus.

Start the flap out smaller- barely beyond just being a nub- and then try to split the species to go in two different directions. In that last post I went two ways with body without even giving a driving reason they should change that way except that it seems like they would work. Well, they're expansions of how something that's already there works but it's almost nothing at all compared to the kind of "and now the heart is adapted to spit poison at prey" kind of steps. By having a lot of things with just squashed and stretched shapes you can just go down the list squinting at them until "hey! I bet that one could be work like a shovel and turn stuff over."

Once we actually had kind of a lot of little variations and a handful of refinements to them I actually had this one kind of prompt in mind- I don't feel like I can do it with what we've got now though.

Oh right, 1 to 10. Well if we look at just one early era of the Darwin 4 thing we'd be a 6ish and the other places haven't exactly been the sort of thing you could compare this to- like they'd say "a meteor hits Earth at such and such a time and only the squid really survive. How do we think they would evolve?"

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Well like I said initially I only really expected some simple 2d sketches for things. Once in awhile maybe clarify how any organs sat inside of things but really only if the organs changed much.

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There's a forum called something like speculative evolution. Those are the "what if Kangaroos were the main animal type on the Asian continent" guys. They weren't too interested in getting away from progress oriented thinking though so this would sort of have a better claim to being about evolution.

I'm not really any good at naming things. I've got a fairly large vocabulary but if you asked me to just make a list of words I know I'd get stuck at a hilariously early point. As such I can't really "just keep thinking" to try and find a name for something. With a thesaurus the best I could think of was "Diverge, Evolve, Formulate." so yeah, I don't think I'm going to be much help in this particular department.

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Well again I'm talking about the torus-shaped  bubble-organ. For the first thing picture the body getting longer (taller) with fingers growing out from the donut to extend into the new space and be close enough to spread nutrients. With the other one picture the body getting wider and the torus stretching to be a ring with a wide hole in the middle, again, so that it's close to most parts of the body. In both cases the head can still get nutrients from the bubble organ.

*I'm realizing that although I don't like giving them a classification at this point they do need some kind of name just so we could list things quickly.

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So were you not interested in doing life cycles for things? Being small, like right after birth, tends to be the most likely time for being eaten, what with all of those gargantuans about that are so good at sucking up any bacteria remotely near themselves. Naturally spending as little time like this as possible is preferred so a lot of things will swim around for just awhile then cement themselves to a rock. Growing on a rock is rather different from swimming around so a lot of things actually do drastic stuff like changing the whole direction their body faces (like maybe they attach any which way and then want the mouth at the new "top" of their body,) while others actually have two generations- one where they grow a sort of plant-like structure and one where they swim around (Jellyfish do this- the young swimming ones are actually kind of just a flat * shaped thing until they eventually grow the bulb and tentacle shape.) We should probably work out ways for these things to send off children out into the world- it's sort of a big aspect of surviving.

[Supermikhail]

Bonkers. Forgot about that step completely. Being reminded of it now, though, gives me an idea for evolutionising the way this thread works. It's actually only a modification of an idea I wrote about on page 3-5 or something like that. Basically, each new creature has to have some parameters set and looked into. One of the simpler ones would be "What does it eat and how does it eat?", others would be "How does it reproduce?" and "How do the young survive in this cruel world?" Beyond giving a more distinct picture of the creature, it would help drive the thought process on. I also like your idea of small modifications, but I've got something rather radical for this thread to add to it. Say we do it like evolution?


Yeah, I mean, we don't dwell on a single creature - for days, now - but try to throw out as many variations as we can. Regardless of whether they resemble critters we have on Earth. Hopefully, if the world is different enough from ours, the ones that aren't unique are going to go extinct just because they don't fit. If not - well, bats and birds don't file law suits for copyright infringement. Or we can just ignore them later.

Oh. Also. I just thought of how to make "the classification and keeping track of" process a bit easier. Could there be made a place, like in a post, for storing all the animals currently on the Ark? Given enough time, I could make a thumbnail for each creature, and most creatures currently have names that could be placed under the pictures. What would be better, though, is if there was a site on the Internet that provided a means to make a neat-looking evolution tree. I can't find anything like that, but maybe you've seen one?

Update:I haven't had any time to edit the donutsaur seriously, but did some more graphics experimentation. How does that feel?


More update: For a sample of what Blender can actually do (but what I have only tapped into), watch this short movie, the latest endeavour of the Blender community.