heget's Beautified Bovines
Feb. 2nd, 2013 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hegetWarning: Lots of pics and a long post!
Also if you downloaded this at Plumbbob keep, I have fixed the cow recolors (a few pixels of the larger horn were still visible on non-horned recolors and two of the files only had the default texture. D'ouh!)
Sunni provided the cabbages, but we were lacking the cattle. No more!
So how long have I been working on a version of this project? ....a long time. Basically since before Almighty Hat's first post to GOS about having a better looking version of Mickyss's cows. Which is a project I did a few times and here's the latest version. What I did was take that familiar -and quite old and recolor-unfriendly- mesh and break it apart to re-map (and therefore a few tiny remeshing details like the horns and actually making the thing symmetrical). The recolors themselves were mapped as to not be symmetrical, so the pattern doesn't freaky mirror for the spotted ones.
Sunni helped with repositing the suckers and Herr was my photographer for most (aka the pretty) previews.
Then squirrel-girl went to town recoloring and tweaking out a few poses, as is my wont.
Poses, you say? About 5 additional ones- mostly just subtle things moving the head so that when the dairy cows were in their stalls they weren't carbon copies. And one with a head lowered to mimic grazing and another lying down- which, yes, isn't correct because I'm not actuallty that good at manipulating the meshes for all the fancy gaited poses like people have done with the horses.
Oh, and two steers (boys missing an element- because a herd of only ladies looks 'udder'-ly odd. And as oxen your peasant farmers need them to pull plows and carts.)
They are slightly bigger and bulkier than the cows so you can tell them apart- aside from the obvious...
Only two poses so far for them- basic and a lowered 'possibly about to charge'.
Info: The mesh labeled MASTER is, you guessed it, the master for all the recolors.
And here I blather on for a while:
As for the recolors themselves- as a feature of the mesh I made three ways to deal with horns. Many but not all cows breeds have horns- and they can be many shapes. Most recolors have the basic 'horned'- which are the shape we tend to think of nowadays. But I also made part of the mesh to have large, lyre-shaped horns. These recolored are labeled 'horns-bigger'. These large horns (but not quite the Texas Longhorn shape because I am playing a medival game) are found on breeds like the Ancient British White Park and other antiquity-rooted breeds like the white Italian breeds and the fighting bulls of the Iberian. And it's assumed that the domesticated cow Bos Taurus came from a small herd of aurouch-like animals in the Fertile Cresent at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, so the oldest breeds tend to retain that look.
Polled is no horns. Both male and female can be polled- it's a genetic trait farmers have slowly been breeding in to many breeds. Or like the modern Aryshire where the horns are removed.
Cows in the medieval ages were smaller than modern cows (and also smaller than the Bronze Age or Greco-Roman), mainly due to cost of feeding a larger beast and because cattle of this period were used for the plow, and a smaller draft animal would navigate the turns easier.
List of some medieval appropriate breeds:
I am no expert. This is from browsing the 'net or from living in Texas.
'Alphine' or Swiss Brown, Ancient White Park, Canadienne and Jersey and Normandie or their ancestors, 'Celtic' Black aka root of the Angus and Galloway, Corriente (Spanish cow that devolps into all those big-horned American landrace cattle of which the Longhorn is most famous), any that fall under 'Italian Podolian' aka the big white draft cows of Italy, 'Norsecattle' and its descendents like the Icelandic and pretty much a majority of Scandivanian breeds plus most of the pied colors like the Pinzgauer (circa 500 AD) and older Bavarian breeds, and the belted Dutch Lakenvelder. Frankly if your medieval hood needs cows, you can justify most of the colors for whatever region you have. Except any hood set in the Indian Sub-continent or the Ankole-Watusi-Sanga of Africa. Becuase those are Bos Zebu and have a distinctive hump. Or any modern crossbreeds between the two strains. (I live a hour and a half from the famous King Ranch where the speciality- aside from being a bigger-than-the-state-of-Rhode-Island famous Texas cattle ranch is that its breeding program has created something like seven new cow breeds.) So Alexander, you need to stick to the red Egyptian cattle or those lyre-horned Greek grays.
A run down of the colors of which I have pictured: (Most have at least a horned and a 'polled' aka natural hornless version)
White, Dun, Almost Black, Pure Black (Some blacks are for 'Galloways', others have the white muzzle and look more 'aurouch' or Spanish bull), Mahogany Brown
Yellow, Golden Brown, Red, Ginger Red, More Reddish-Brown, Red and Black (pattern you see on Normandy and Canadian imported from Viking-settled, French countryside),
Swiss brown in a few shades (bottom right)
Belted in both Black and Brown ('oreo' cows, orginially a Dutch breed possibly older than the Holstien)
'Holstien' is parti-colored in a few black spots (2 patterns) plus a red version
Colour-sided: this is the other way to have a spoted cow and is really what you tend to see when looking at the parti-colors. It's also called line-back or frame because obviously the white flows along the spine and the color is limited to the cows' sides. In extreme white there might only be a few spots of color on the side or maybe just the ears (Ancient British Park). Also most medieval and pre-medieval cows in Scandinavia and Central Germany would be this.
I've done a version for most of the solid shades in some pattern variation.
Counting both the base and all the polled, horned, and bigger-horns variations there are 55 cow colors.Holy cow, heget! Stop.
Everything labeled and Compressorized. It's found in Deco.
Polycount is 3584 on two tiles.
Cow Meshes
Cow Recolors
Now Moo-ve It!
Also if you downloaded this at Plumbbob keep, I have fixed the cow recolors (a few pixels of the larger horn were still visible on non-horned recolors and two of the files only had the default texture. D'ouh!)
Sunni provided the cabbages, but we were lacking the cattle. No more!
So how long have I been working on a version of this project? ....a long time. Basically since before Almighty Hat's first post to GOS about having a better looking version of Mickyss's cows. Which is a project I did a few times and here's the latest version. What I did was take that familiar -and quite old and recolor-unfriendly- mesh and break it apart to re-map (and therefore a few tiny remeshing details like the horns and actually making the thing symmetrical). The recolors themselves were mapped as to not be symmetrical, so the pattern doesn't freaky mirror for the spotted ones.
Sunni helped with repositing the suckers and Herr was my photographer for most (aka the pretty) previews.
Then squirrel-girl went to town recoloring and tweaking out a few poses, as is my wont.
Poses, you say? About 5 additional ones- mostly just subtle things moving the head so that when the dairy cows were in their stalls they weren't carbon copies. And one with a head lowered to mimic grazing and another lying down- which, yes, isn't correct because I'm not actuallty that good at manipulating the meshes for all the fancy gaited poses like people have done with the horses.
Oh, and two steers (boys missing an element- because a herd of only ladies looks 'udder'-ly odd. And as oxen your peasant farmers need them to pull plows and carts.)
They are slightly bigger and bulkier than the cows so you can tell them apart- aside from the obvious...
Only two poses so far for them- basic and a lowered 'possibly about to charge'.
Info: The mesh labeled MASTER is, you guessed it, the master for all the recolors.
And here I blather on for a while:
As for the recolors themselves- as a feature of the mesh I made three ways to deal with horns. Many but not all cows breeds have horns- and they can be many shapes. Most recolors have the basic 'horned'- which are the shape we tend to think of nowadays. But I also made part of the mesh to have large, lyre-shaped horns. These recolored are labeled 'horns-bigger'. These large horns (but not quite the Texas Longhorn shape because I am playing a medival game) are found on breeds like the Ancient British White Park and other antiquity-rooted breeds like the white Italian breeds and the fighting bulls of the Iberian. And it's assumed that the domesticated cow Bos Taurus came from a small herd of aurouch-like animals in the Fertile Cresent at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, so the oldest breeds tend to retain that look.
Polled is no horns. Both male and female can be polled- it's a genetic trait farmers have slowly been breeding in to many breeds. Or like the modern Aryshire where the horns are removed.
Cows in the medieval ages were smaller than modern cows (and also smaller than the Bronze Age or Greco-Roman), mainly due to cost of feeding a larger beast and because cattle of this period were used for the plow, and a smaller draft animal would navigate the turns easier.
List of some medieval appropriate breeds:
I am no expert. This is from browsing the 'net or from living in Texas.
'Alphine' or Swiss Brown, Ancient White Park, Canadienne and Jersey and Normandie or their ancestors, 'Celtic' Black aka root of the Angus and Galloway, Corriente (Spanish cow that devolps into all those big-horned American landrace cattle of which the Longhorn is most famous), any that fall under 'Italian Podolian' aka the big white draft cows of Italy, 'Norsecattle' and its descendents like the Icelandic and pretty much a majority of Scandivanian breeds plus most of the pied colors like the Pinzgauer (circa 500 AD) and older Bavarian breeds, and the belted Dutch Lakenvelder. Frankly if your medieval hood needs cows, you can justify most of the colors for whatever region you have. Except any hood set in the Indian Sub-continent or the Ankole-Watusi-Sanga of Africa. Becuase those are Bos Zebu and have a distinctive hump. Or any modern crossbreeds between the two strains. (I live a hour and a half from the famous King Ranch where the speciality- aside from being a bigger-than-the-state-of-Rhode-Island famous Texas cattle ranch is that its breeding program has created something like seven new cow breeds.) So Alexander, you need to stick to the red Egyptian cattle or those lyre-horned Greek grays.
A run down of the colors of which I have pictured: (Most have at least a horned and a 'polled' aka natural hornless version)
White, Dun, Almost Black, Pure Black (Some blacks are for 'Galloways', others have the white muzzle and look more 'aurouch' or Spanish bull), Mahogany Brown
Yellow, Golden Brown, Red, Ginger Red, More Reddish-Brown, Red and Black (pattern you see on Normandy and Canadian imported from Viking-settled, French countryside),
Swiss brown in a few shades (bottom right)
Belted in both Black and Brown ('oreo' cows, orginially a Dutch breed possibly older than the Holstien)
'Holstien' is parti-colored in a few black spots (2 patterns) plus a red version
Colour-sided: this is the other way to have a spoted cow and is really what you tend to see when looking at the parti-colors. It's also called line-back or frame because obviously the white flows along the spine and the color is limited to the cows' sides. In extreme white there might only be a few spots of color on the side or maybe just the ears (Ancient British Park). Also most medieval and pre-medieval cows in Scandinavia and Central Germany would be this.
I've done a version for most of the solid shades in some pattern variation.
Counting both the base and all the polled, horned, and bigger-horns variations there are 55 cow colors.Holy cow, heget! Stop.
Everything labeled and Compressorized. It's found in Deco.
Polycount is 3584 on two tiles.
Cow Meshes
Cow Recolors
Now Moo-ve It!