Several Unrelated Irritants

[Tearless]

Not huge issues, really, but they bug the heck out of me.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed this since a good 75% of all the wolves you meet are black or partially black: they look like a dark void. There's no texture, the lighting doesn't seem to affect them, and the result is basically a bunch of silouhettes running around, which is all well and good for demons or darkness elementals or what have you, but just looks weird in realistic RPs. The problem probably wouldn't be that hard to fix, either, given that it doesn't exist for the manes.

Secondly, canine ears. Specifically in certain emotes. See, this is what an angry wolf looks like:

This, on the other hand, is what an angry wolf looks like in FeralHeart (yes, he's a dog, shaddup, it's the same mesh):

I'm not even gonna start about that lower jaw.

Even at the best of times, the ears are a little funny-looking:

It almost looks like they were put on backwards after the meshes were made. I don't even know what happened with the emote. Nothing native to this galaxy has ears that do that. If you look at this (not angry) wolf, you'll notice that they curve inward, not outward, and they don't have the weird deep-dish thing going on that the mesh does.

He's not angry, just very disappointed.

I have a nagging suspicion that this could be made a lot better simply by switching the ears around and repositioning them a tiny bit. If anyone knows more about how these things work, let me know.

Finally, the third issue: the tails. They kind of look like they belong on a My Little Pony (I'm talking about the ones from the 80's here). I even googled 'wolves with fluffy tails' in order to find a picture of a real wolf with a tail anything like as grand as the ones we're currently sporting, and the only things it turned up were foxes, Halloween costumes I can't post without getting in trouble, and, for some reason, squirrels. This led me to two conclusions: First, I'm concerned that the internet thinks wolves are small tree-climbing rodents. Second, there is no wolf alive with a tail that big and fluffy. Again, it's great if your character is a fox or a sparkledog (or a squirrel), but what about those of us who are actually fond of realism? Granted, there are a lot of other things I could nitpick about on our fluffy sparklemesh, but the tails and ears are the big ones to me. Just putting in one more slider to alter the size would help a lot.

Shown above: A vicious, snarling wolf. The Internet wouldn't lie.

Now, I can't say, since mesh-making is not my area of expertise, how difficult it would be to change these last two. For all I know the ears move like that because that's the only way they could do it without the ears floating away from the head or something. I also don't know whether this bothers anyone else; maybe other people like the way it looks and I'm being a Realism Nazi. If I am, do feel free to tell me so.

[CloudFish]

It's always bothered me to an extent about the ears. I highly doubt we'll be getting any fixes to the anatomy of the models though.

I wouldn't cross that last wolf though, thing looks vicious for sure.

[Tearless]

I know it's highly improbable... same with the walk cycles; it sounds like Kovu is neither able to fix them, nor willing to let others help. Ah well. I can keep hoping.

Oh, and I totally saw a wolf in my neighbor's tree yesterday. Scared the heck out of me!

[shusuke]

This could be fixed in five to six easy steps, actually.

---I) "Clear" the weight paint off of both ears
---II) Delete one ear; reposition the remainder
---III) Apply a "mirror modifier" and adjust/modify the remaining ear (mirrors automatically follow edits to the mirrored ear)
---IV) Re-apply the armature/skeleton to the non-mirrored ear with an  x-axis mirror applied so both ears will be rigged to corresponding bones
---V) Test animations of the rig with ears; make according changes
---VI) Apply the "mirror" to turn the "reflected" ear into a solid one.

Save and you're done.

Also, seeing as the expressions are more or less "frozen" to that specific expression, all that would be needed is to "duplicate" the snarl/growl/whatever emote that is (since I can't remember it) and then adjust the jaw until it's in a more realistic position.

30-60 minutes of work for decent to really good people with a good reference photo or two.

[Vacio]

The ears are kinda odd...
But I do say, The animal in Feral Heart is called 'canine' rather than being called 'wolf'

[Ouuka]

Lol, all true