Think biologically and from evolutionary term and understand that life is not obligated to follow our highly specific path.
This is how you do aliens people. None of that Rubber Forehead bullcrap.
Aliens
Camden Cook
Cameron Roberts
>he doesn't know about convergent evolution
Chase Roberts
Convergent evolution does not produce the exact same thing.
Jaxon Richardson
How would you know? Have you seen an actual alien?
Connor Clark
>None of that Rubber Forehead bullcrap
tell that to the designers in the 60s and 70s who only had five bucks and two days to make an alien
Robert Williams
>understand that life is not obligated to follow our highly specific path.
Yeah but it kinda does.
Kevin Howard
>That Vernor Vinge novel with the hivemind ferrets that can go senile due to inbreeding
That was an amazing feat of creature design.
Grayson Allen
user, those 3 things are basically rubber forehead equivilents of each other.
They have the same basic body shape and number of limbs/limb structure, apart from Dolphins having a horozontal fluke instead of a vertical fin.
Showing those three images would be much like putting the mass effect alien races (the bipedal ones) in a lineup next to each other.
Brandon Wood
I like both creepy eldritch abominations and pokemon-esque mashups of animals, but straight up humanoids are harder to swallow unless you justify it.
Justin Jones
>but straight up humanoids are harder to swallow unless you justify it.
They had sex with people
Tyler Perez
Not necessarily
Colton Thompson
Daniel Nguyen
But isn’t something like OPs pic an example of convergent evolution? I mean it has everything that Earth life has and even has a similar design ideal as humans, what with their arms not being used for anything but arm stuff. It’s not exactly humanoid but given that it’s from another planet, it’s still very very very close
Adam Scott
I just want space klowns
Elijah Diaz
unrelatable
Ethan White
space ants are not more realistic than space cats
Nathan Cooper
Humans also have two arms and two legs because the first vertebrates to crawl out of the ocean were tetrapods, though. It's efficient for sure, but not a prerequisite for tool use and sapience.
Luke Collins
Owen Reyes
Yes because dolphins have gills, claspers, jaws detached from their braincase and skeletons mostly made of cartilage.
Jayden White
If you want to get really super into it, come up with the alien planet first, then apply everything we know about life and think of what could evolve and thrive enough in your fictional alien environment.
Oliver Cox
OC incoming relevant to this. It's not supposed to be realistic but Its an attempt at a very inhuman alien.
One of the protagonists of an animation and comic series I'm working on is an alien named Trype (voiced by Johnathan Wojcik AKA Bogleech). Her species, the Trog Blatterans are invertebrates that crawl on the ground like slugs and have numerous retractable tentacles that come out of holes covering their bodies. They live in the caves of a hollow planet called Diplovast and have poor vision and light sensitive skin. Trype has remedied these afflictions with the use of cybernetics and various self performed surgeries.
Her species' sex is not determined until adolescence where the females develop an ovipositor that previously was used for parasitic brooding, however since then their species has degenerated enough to where the female simply lay their eggs inside the Male's abdomen and later the young burst out of his skin like a surinam toad.
For all their faults and devolutions the Trog Blatterans are extremely hard to kill and can regenerate even from small dismembered segments like some species of flatworms which help them to survive their violent reproductive cycle and helped Trype perform her amatuer surgeries since things like dismemberment, blood transfusion and disembowelment are very low risk.
Jaxson Stewart
Here's a screenshot from an animation where she's fleeing her home planet. You can see the differences between her and the rest of her kind here. She was born with skin covering her eyes, her skin is blue because she replaced her blood with a synthetic replacement that helps to cool cybernetic implants, and she stands upright due to the aid of one of her inventions, the spine bag.
Daniel Mitchell
>None of that Rubber Forehead bullcrap.
Fuck off, there is an explanation for that
>Muh convergent evolution
convergent evolution works only for animals belongings to the same phyla. Try to compare anything belonging to anellida and chordata, or arthropoda and mollusca. And these come all from the same planet.
Oliver Young
She's really cute for a slug! Has a lot of IZ vibes tho
Chase Harris
Indulgences granted to a live-action TV producer facing budget and time constraints are not owed to a comic-book artist limited only by imagination.
Jaxson Adams
>4 eyes
>4 arms
Too much brain power required and you can see that it's head isn't big enough for a brain of the caliber required.
So what? Nobody is saying that aliens should have the same organs.
>anellida and chordata, or arthropoda and mollusca
None of those creatures are even remotely intelligent.
>two arms and two legs[...]efficient for sure, but not a prerequisite for tool use and sapience.
Actually it is, intelligent creatures can only have so much appendages because brains can only do so much work.
Nolan Thompson
>Fuck off, there is an explanation for that
No there isn't. That illogical handwave was far too fucking stupid to deserve the word 'explanation'.
If aliens had seeded all the relevant worlds with life easy back when, it would then make sense for aliens to have DNA, and share some similarities in basic biochemistry.
It does not explain why, 3 billion years later, every planet has humans with rubber on their heads.
That basic genetic seed on earth produced jellyfish, and pterosaurs, and trees, and sea slugs, and malarial parasites. It's not 'instant humanoid, just shake and allow to stand for a few billion years'.
Jordan Sanchez
That only really happens when animals fulfill a similar niche in a similar environment, and even you will still find a common ancestor somewhere along the line. I doubt an alien planet is going to have the same pressures that would produce anything similar to a humanoid.
Eli Watson
>Actually it is, intelligent creatures can only have so much appendages because brains can only do so much work.
You are making a lot of assumptions there. Maybe brains that evolved on earth are not capable of that, but an alien environment might be different. Also, there's no reason to assume an alien couldn't have multiple brains or brain-like ganglia to control its body while still having room for advanced cognition. Again, that doesn't really happen here on Earth because of energy constraints, but an alien planet might be different.
Levi Bailey
>Too much brain power required and you can see that it's head isn't big enough for a brain of the caliber required.
Octopus have more distributed nervous systems, with most of the neurons being located outside the central brain. Some of the most intelligent birds are able to pack complex cognitive functions into much tinier brains than primates can manage, as their brains are organised differently. Alien brains might well use an entirely different kind of signalling than the neurons used by earth animals, so we're not qualified to say anything about what sort of organisation may be possible.
Parker Martinez
I think he was referring to the fact that humans in costumes were really the only financially feasible way to portray aliens in movies and tv up until recently.
Ethan Carter
>4 eyes
>4 arms
>Too much brain power
Tell that to spiders
Christopher Torres
I mean it depends on the genre really. If you're going for hard sci-fi sure, something with that level of detail is expected. If you're going more with science fantasy you can have fun with it
Easton Reyes
Yeah, and they use all their brain power using them.
Justin Ward
>he doesn't know about Portia jumping spiders