flock.yowe

What one yowe is made of.

A yowe is a Swaledale-shaped hill ewe gone half-wild on a saltmarsh: a lumpy, peat-stained fleece, a black face with a pale nose, black legs, and a short horn curling back under the ear.

Yowe.build(parent, name, seed) stands one up under parent and returns the handful of parts the flock driver animates — the root it moves, the head pivot it turns, and the four legs it swings.

Why it is built the way it is

The silhouette has to carry at gameplay distance in a dark 3:4 frame. So the fleece is a cluster of overlapping lobes rather than one smooth capsule: a smooth capsule reads as a pill and a lumpy one reads as wool. Nothing else in the build matters as much.

The head hangs off its own pivot. Skull, muzzle, ears, eyes and horn are all children of it, so the driver turns the whole head with one write a frame instead of ten — and a yowe that has stopped can put its head down and graze.

Six of them must not read as one animal six times. Every yowe is varied from its seed and stays varied across a reload: overall size, the position and swell of each fleece lobe, how bleached or peat-stained the wool is, and whether it is horned at all — two in six are polled. The colour variation rides on the Model component's own tint, so all six still share one set of materials.

The tint blends toward a flat colour rather than multiplying the shaded one, so a heavy blend flattens the animal into a paper cut-out. It is kept low on purpose: enough that one ewe is browner than the next, not enough to take the light off her back.

Materials

Seven, in /source/flock/materials, shared by every animal: two fleece greys and a peat-stained one (all with a sheen lobe, which is what makes wool look like wool rather than plastic), the near-black face, the pale muzzle, dull horn, and an eye with a small warm emissive so it catches the lantern in a dark frame.