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[Shoku]

Is 4 supposed to be the first one I suggested with the branching gut?

Overall this looks pretty good but now I don't recall which came from which.

-The ship was just supposed to indicate directions. The large ring would be the donut shape that was already there and the spires coming off of it would be the new extensions growing off of the old shape.
And for the other option just imagine you took a clay model of the creature and then dropped a steamroller on it. It would be much wider but much flatter. Ok, a steamroller would flatten it much too much but anyway the mouth would pretty much go flush with the body to really just have the teeth sort of stick out of an otherwise flat surface. If you took a plate and stuck upside down on top of another plate that is the general body proportion I am picturing for variant #2. #1 would be more like a vertical hot dog.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah. N4 is the bulbousaur. The progenitor of saurs, so to say.

Well, 5, 6, 9 and 12 all came from burger. When I looked through the thread yesterday, it appears that 7 and 8 came from xwingus. The rest are saurs, and a flowery splotch on the floor which didn't really go anywhere.

So, before I get my imagination rolling, do these donutsaur evolutions still have guts? I mean, I'm having difficulty placing any internal organs inside the "steam-rolled" one. And, hm, how is the "spaceship" one like a hot dog? It has a winding sausage of guts inside it, I imagine, but the bun? I the donut not a single whole anymore?

[Shoku]

Here's the general shapes. I didn't try to draw a mouth or a gut but with the same spots for holes to the outside I'm sure you could find a path between them~

[Supermikhail]

Wow. What's that program?

Hm. N2 could get a weird squiggle of a gut in the middle.

[Shoku]

Well actually if you were going to have a single loop of spiral for the gut on the second one you could increase the contact area by making it wavy up and down. I think that's me trying to jump the shark though.

-

Just photoshop. I used the brush, pen tool, and layer options set to bevel and emboss. So the lighting is really just fake but the one thing looks good because I erased things to make the vertical parts look attached. I figured I probably couldn't make the image make much visual sense without some shading so I tried that and got alright results after some struggling with it.

I screwed up th perspective a little by rushing it though. The side arms end up looking longer than the middle one.
One thought though- if it had the muscles to squeeze that organ a bit it could intentionally make one shorter and others longer, which should bend the body. Might end up being an alright way to move some appendages without the muscles attached to bones or complex bone layers thing.

[Supermikhail]

I'm having a bit of a crisis of self-worth, justification of existence, or just cracking under peer pressure. And I've got this question: where is it going? What's the point?

[Shoku]

I'm a lousy place to look for answers that because I've always been a "you can't know until you're there" kind of guy- or at least as far back as I can remember.
If that doesn't console you much sorry but you're probably going to have to find meaning on your own. It tends to be really subjective and therefore not something you can just transfer from one person to another.

[Supermikhail]

Erm. I fear we might have a misunderstanding. I meant, where is this Otherworldly Ark going?

[Shoku]

Well, on a scale of
We're only part of the way through even the lowest section (the billions of years of life prior to that were mainly unicellular and at best some really soft bodied stuff. Even if we had more people we wouldn't be plowing through the ages especially quickly.

The ultimate goal isn't to create some alien species but to have an alien biosphere.

[Korbac]

Perhaps it could result in an emergent version of Dungeon Biologist? 

[Shoku]

Pretty much gonna need more people but yeah, I'm sure a lot of stuff worthy of guest appearances in other fiction settings could pop up from this.

[Supermikhail]

The ultimate goal isn't to create some alien species but to have an alien biosphere.

And?
I mean, what do you call a biosphere? If our evolution goes completely not the way the Earth's evolution went, how are you going to decide we're there? And when you decide, then what? Is this thread going to be ready for release (where?), to sink into archives or what?

[Shoku]

Well right now one of the distinctions I'm looking for before I say "era #2" is what the food web looks like. I'm kind of playing that by ear but if it gets to be a tricky decision I know where to look to sharpen the line.

As I said at the start we're pretty much doing alternate history on Earth right now so I was going to have certain prompts for at least a few key transitions. When we have got a good selection of animals I can see about trying to do something like this for plants, try some less Earth-like planets, or see if I can discern ways that alternatives to cells might differ on large scales.

[Supermikhail]

Well, that's how it might progress, through what phases it might go. But what does it go to? What does this thread try to achieve? Does it intend to bear any palpable fruits? Or is it just another experiment in procrastination?

I kind of some time ago thought that I might become a great 3D designer through this thread, but I doubt that's going to happen because 3D design turns out just too time-consuming to take it as a vocation and hope to become a professional.

I don't see it somehow becoming a part of a literary work, or inspiring music. Much less, having some practical application, for which I don't really care much anyway.

What's more, at current rate, I don't see this project getting into particularly interesting and lively places, like creatures with vivid appearances and a weird gait, in months, and what you project as a goal - in years. While I, for example, can't say with certainty where I'm going to be in half-a-year, if I'm going to have Internet access. Actually, I can't say if I'm going to be in any capacity to communicate coherently in a month, because quite a stressful event in my life approaches.

I guess, at the time of crisis, I'm trying to decide whether this project is the one that I can rely on, that, if I put a significant part of my time into, will make me feel fulfilled.

[Shoku]

I've always had a more-than-one-other-person group of people in mind for this. Of course we're lost trying to do so much and innovate so many times.

I haven't ever tried 3d design but I've done enough animation work to know how time consuming these things can be, and really even just drawing beyond some scribbles seems very time consuming to anyone that never did it much. In time you get faster about it but ultimately in time you stop caring as much about a few hours of time spent on something artistic when you could have been checking facebook updates or watching commercials or whatever.

But the fruits of this? The real fruit is that next time I will know how to do it better. If I can make it straightforward enough we could get people doing a whole lot in a short while and thus actually creating their aliens this way instead of using hallucinations as inspiration for just a single boring species. We could go from fiction having worlds that were about as much like nature as a stick and leaf in a jar to actually having something as crowded as a real world but from actual detail rather than just taking the author on their word about it being crowded.

So if we really want this to go it has to transition to numerous things happening in one day instead of just the one or two exchanges between us. Well, that or you could figure out how to do what I expected from ten people. I haven't been rushing this because I simply don't know how to get anyone else who would participate in this besides keeping a thread active and waiting.