Shipbucket

Dissatisfied with the pose, format and handling of franscale, I embarked on making new human templates to draw in 1px = 1.5cm, a scale which I find very optimal to display infantry and crew next to ground vehicles. You might have seen them already here: http://shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=9700

They have become reasonably popular in the SB Discord, and I have talked to the admins about adopting them officially. While they're in the exact same scale as Franscale, many have opted to call the format "Charscale" after your humble servant, or duders like fran "figures" were sometimes called, but they now belong in the Soldierbucket channel in Discord.

The following chart with bases has been released for use:



The base pose, top row, 2nd from right, is based on an anatomy drawing showing a man with "normal" proportions (7 1/2 heads tall) found on a book by Andrew Loomis, and all the other poses and ethnic bases are based on it. The female base is also based on a drawing by Loomis. I've tried to include a wide variety of ethnicities and poses so people can pick them up easily, even providing an "ethnically neutral" one for those whose jimmies are rustled by the very concept of ethnicity, who I've fondly come to call Micky. Of course, the idea is that if you need a different pose, height or ethnicity you pick the best choice from here and mod it to suit your needs.

Now, there are a few technical and rules issues and questions to be answered:

So far the feedback on the bases has come to:

- the head is a bit too big
- the hands are a bit too big
- the chest is too broad, specially in the "at attention" pose

My thoughts are that, while this is all true in a vaccum, the bases look just fine once clothing is tacked on. There is a degree of exaggeration inherent in pixelart and on this scale, which is moderately small for human figures, exaggeration will be part and parcel. If you want to explore the possibilities and are not satisfied with the bases, you're free to mod em to suit your needs of course.

Also stylewise, I have tried and mostly succeeded to keep colouring down to three shades of any given colour, which is a bit exaggerated maybe, but I think there's value in keeping shades tight. Again, something up to debate.

Ruleswise, the one thing I am sure I want to keep is black outlines. While I've experimented with "soft" outlines and figured they don't look bad at all, it goes against the spirit of SB and ends up looking bad in the long run once you add vehicles. I've experimented with other things like coloured backgrounds and the "drop shadow" feature, which I think looks awesome, so I'd like to keep the style more loose than strict SB style. Rifles and other small objects also don't always have black outlines on very thin elements. I'd love to hear your opinions.

Incidentally this scale is eminently compatible with carbucket scale (20px = 1 ft) at least as far as guns and human figures go, it diverges by about 1px per meter.

Lastly, a very important thing to debate is the crediting rules. I am willing to release the bases with no credits if this whole ordeal ends up being put under the fair use licese's aegis, but what composes a part and what composes something to be credited has to be defined.

I'll leave you with some bits I've done so far and would again love to hear your opinions on these issues.
I know Golly has done something on the same scale, he has shown them to me, so I'd love it too if he could share that to have some contrast.



some real guns I've completed



some SB friends that offered to get drawn, will they come out and say who they are?



And finally some random fellows nobody has ever heard about.

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w o r k l i s t :
Hatsuyuki-class Escort Ships . . . <3

dem boiz they naked

why one pose man doing the blacked.com thing with one hand doe?

(im ddrunk)

hoodie boi (yo is that kalgsdf???) and m. bison would have been gr88 additions in like

2016 when the linc thread was on FIAH and all we had was ar-TITS-a drawing gears of war muscle doods

why one of these dudes white like micheangelo sculpture tho is he an elf?

i got LOADS of flamscale stuff i could post

here is a football man



also some sikh dooder



here u see how i evolved franscale to the 1 px 1 cm i usually draw in now

and a rockit that i posted 3 yrs ago



and a plane



if anyone wants to draw on plenis idgaf

ok l8r guys k_hand:

e: dintin drew a flamscale wamanz already but i dont have the linque sry

this one is shoreter tho so it's better than dintin's prob which was kinda primitvfe cos she was bald :vv

some other shit i drew like 5 yrs ago





rthe rokti in equpi3 is supposed tob e French ACRA not a TOW do NOT confuse thems pls ty~

e23: fuk the aai smg is wrong

bagera1776 drew it better because he copied form the bok it's in

also half hte things on that chart are fake but that ye should be obviosu which rly tbf like idk just look at my DA lmao

e45: the lil boi rokit is a CRv7 uhhh also the w54 is basedo n a fake trianing bomb not a real deal whizbang boi dwi

ewhatever: the thicc boi chestu is real the naked sikh and wytboi are average male torso and barbarian football is Overly Big so your dudes are like riace warriors or sth btw mb shrincc by like 2 px in both directions

i dont think in franscale very well since it's a fractional scale of 1.5:1 but the legs seem a bit thicc too and in general it helps to round down rather than round up in scaling in flamscale so even thiccbois will be a bit skinny/meat on the bones sort of thing where they need a bit of protein to build their sticcboi bodies but that's because again it's fractional

i guess if you wanted you could represent the thiccbois with 50% opacity pixels on the border but that would be odd and hard to think in terms of and youd still want to shrink the chest breadths and thigh thickness by 2px/1px for either imo that is 1px in both direction for the chest and 1 px each for the chests as fran seems to have done a p good job in his scaling of the initial franscale dummy in terms of headsize rly; hands and head are big but the chest size is the real boner in the mistake sense here

teh female is more akin to average male size imo but invert the body from wasp to dorito and you got it imo but that is basically the half naked sven svensson i drew

fightan mans are not very big bois theyre smol and weedy cos they cardio every day true otter mode

otoh bagelmen like normie industrial males should be like 2 px wide arms tbh actual stick men to capture the size of their limbs

but really art books like to draw ubermensch like riace rather than sticcmen like Sgt. Sven Svensson who is just a human sticc but has lungs like a real human bellows

it's an issue i discerned drawing the spergscale footmen that all basic art books tend to draw idealized overmans rather than true human body so if youre going for olympian powerlifter or AHNULD it's great but Normie McDonald will be btfo byh such luscious pectorals rly so i ended up drawing sorta dumpy looking duders who are way fitter and thiccer than any sticcman of the industrial era t. i just examined my own body and measured with a tape measure

i mean i just casually keep a tape measure in my desk for measuring important things like head circumference and wrist but idk

pictures of US Marines officers doing a run are Prime Territory for finding Absolute Specimens of the Industrial Man imo

these dueds would not look out of place on a bodybuilder competition but they aint Normie McDonald's who is just a duder who is a bit thin but wiry but tough as nails cos he DENSE and CUTS BIG

just my 0.5 cny

e621: i edited this like 12 times just fyi but like ye for real they thicc bois

art books are ok for getting the general movement flows down but dont trust them for proportions of body they lean more towards muscle man mcmachodude than joe six-pack

ive toyed with drawing a fat dude in spergscale with a killdozer type power loader suit i might do that now but if you shrunk the spergscale dudes down to flamscale theyd be pretty thin overall but beanstalks basically whic his how the ideal combat trooper is built he is a beanstalk man who is thin and wiry but DNESE and TUFF and LIFTS cos he a powerlifter not a barrel chested mega uber like neandertal who is THICC and BIG and honestly nothing else

but fractional scales yeet it's impossible to have a half-pixel rip

i would say 2-4 px thicc ex. borders for arms/shins and 3-4 px thicc for thighs and maybe taper down a bit for forearms if you feel the need to emphasize the skinniness and possibly no more than 10 px thicc for a torso or soabouts owuld be pretty good this would approximate a <whips out tape measure> 30-34" torso which in european is uhhhhhhhh

im durnk no maths someone multiply 30-34*2.54 boo

but yeah it would be about 13-14 cm wide upper which would be about 30" total size a respectable size for a combat t rooper and in line with historical norms of WW2 American GIs which were considered large-ish combat soldiers for their era and certainly very fit, tough, resolute men capable of great Feats of Strength

if you made them like 7 feet tall it would be dope tho they woudl be fine imo since riace warrios are like 9 feet tall ubermen even for greeks who were like 5' nothing bagel boss dudes who got YOMPED byu manlets so yeah if they were just big tall dudes it'd be ok but hten you run into heart conditions and lungs and stuff and it's annoying to deal with and ughhhh

if he's 5' 6"-6' we have a chart for that

the diameter shoudl be 30-34" on the torso which is approx 8-10 px diameter on the frontal and the arms should be 2-3 pixels of flesh color in diameter at the thiccest AND no less than about 4 px at the thinnest so the arms are gonna want to cant inwards as they go down to the wrists and hands

combats mans small is what im saying doe

smaller tahn u think

they me sized rly

but im mostly fat and combat mans mostly muscle so they denser and yolkedier so maybe a bit more resolute and less jiggly than me but still about hte same size

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The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9.6 [million sq. km]. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

Franscale has been fine for nearly a decade without official rules and figures.

Nice work Charguizard!
That "neutral" one looks more like "long deceased". And judging from that wide sheepish smile, it must have been rather pleasant death (Felix Faure-style, perhaps? XD ).

One suggestion I'd make to the rules is going to five shades instead of three. That way you can have a highlight, the "base", and then three darker ones to encompass shadows, bolts, and panels lines on vehicles.

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I agree with three-tone, blackoutlines and scale. The simpler you can keep the style the better. (Thought Id also like this to be uniformal in rules to the other SB scales, so i think discussion of shade limits would warrant a lot larger discussion, elsewhere naturally)

As for the crediting, I think it is bit more complicated than in other scales. In my work with these (or franscale as I then thought i was) I found out that the biggest work went to the creating of the base, not in the actuall clothings, so definetly they are not same as parts vs. Ships.
Perhaps adding the template by: credit in the credit line or in the watermark together with www.shipbucket.com?

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

The gist I got from kat's extensive ethanol fueled discourse was that the bases are too thicc, but then I go back to them looking fine when clothed. Maybe skimpily clad personnel will require more attention from the artist to achieve the effect they need?

Now that daemyrs brought that up, I went back to my vehicles and they indeed use 5 shades. The people, when using the same colours, get more contrast by using the 1st, 3rd and 5th colour. I don't see a need for more than 5 shades, but if you disagree please bring it up.

Here's an example with a template derived from a regular SB template.



It uses 5 shades and I imagine parts rules could work like in FD, so you could take the antenna, the headlamp, the tools on the side. Not sure the whole machinegun should be a part, but maybe it could very well be that guns are parts.

This is a tank on the same chassis with the template I intend to use for my AU stuff. Credits could be kept on the watermark like Golly said, I am 100% behind this. Again, your opinion is important.
The template has the Alternate Universe symbol on the top left, a title and subtitle and relevant information below. It also uses the drop shadow function to make the vehicle pop up, as you may have seen in my Batavian Marines thread.

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w o r k l i s t :
Hatsuyuki-class Escort Ships . . . <3

I wrote that post and passed out on the floor next to my desk IIRC. I'm sober now.

The dudes in the OP are proportioned like Classical era Greek statues.

My impression is either spend too much time at the gym shooting androgens and snorting creatine, or they're professional bodybuilders/sculptors (not a real job), but they aren't really good for linearting FIGHTAN DUDES which is what anyone ever linearted in Franscale. Well, except that one time s o m e o n e linearted a fat kid.

Note that the ridiculously muscled rugby man is about as big as the unfortunately named, but rather large NFL linebacker Dick Butkus, although he is partially squatting or something I think. The infantryman has a chest circumference of about 34-36 inches and a height of about 175-176 centimeters, which puts him squarely in the middle of the road for combat infantrymen of the U.S. Army 1946-1991. US Army soldiers today are bigger than that, but that's mostly because they're wider and fatter, not because they're taller or stronger. GI Joe put on a couple inches between WW2 and now, after all, but he was fairly consistent up through the 1980's when he grew a 37" chest.

A physically fit, teenage-to-late-20s combat soldier is not going to have hugely visible pectorals, either, and will end up looking pretty much exactly the male dummy I posted, with maybe less obvious musculature. If you want a super fit trooper who has maybe been cutting a bit you can draw little shadows where his rib muscles are visible, but that's more "ultracommando frogman" than "tpr. dude". Tpr. Dude is just sorta scrawny looking. Being big is a huge detriment, ultimately, to combat troops which is where cardio counts, and Crossfit is better than ordinary strength training (reps > max). Dudes in the OP look less like GI Joe and more like Grizzly TBH.

So their arms should be a lot thinner and their chests less Dorito shaped. Their heads can be a bit rounder but that's not a huge deal, maybe they just have big jaws, and their legs should be thinner or at least shaded near the back to indicate that this is some sort of bowed out position rather than head-on.

This is a more reasonable size for a footman's body type based on one of the tawny bois:



I'd say his chest is a bit too wide still but I'm not a big dude my chest is like 30" on a good day and when I used to be F i T n E s S it was like maybe another inch so I'm not exactly a pinnacle of size. Let's just say he's barrel chested or something.

Generally speaking it's usually going to be better to be on the small size than the big side, unless you do something Drastic like this:



The black lines should be considered terminating shadows and thus part of the overall thickness, which is why lowballing the thickness of the torso and legs is ideal. He mostly looks thick because of the black lines, really, and once you've eliminated those and adjusted the positions of the arms, legs, and head, you end up with something resembling the skinnier version above this one.

The thicknesses were reduced by about 1 px per limb in the top image, and not touched at all in the bottom image, although I did some minor joining and shading to make the parts more apparent in the lower bit. You're more or less doubling the size of his thighs as is with the black lines, though, so the colored region of flesh should be thinner to compensate, or you should eliminate the black lines altogether, and this results in a far more ordinarily/soldierly proportioned male.

Their clothing probably looks better because most soldiers' combat uniforms sit baggily on them, because the combat troops are skinny dudes. They could be substantially larger, as rear area troops are (in both the fat and bodybuilding sense, since they don't need to actually perform physically to do their job) and still wear the same size and fit inside it.

_________________
The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9.6 [million sq. km]. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

Here is my dude now charguizarded:

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

I could say more to that theme, but for the moment just this:

I worked myself some weeks ago on a franscale table for me to build quick british army uniforms (I also worked on other uniforms). Here are some drawfts: