Explaining Adopties?

[red_uni387]

One of my school friends has expressed an interest in running a fox adoptie. She's a really good artist, but doesn't really get the idea of adopties. And since I stink at explaining, would someone here be able to explain to her what an adoptie is and how you run a shop? XD

[indigowulf]

Hmm.. starting an adoptable guide.. let me try my hand at a basic one.

Step 1: Decide what format you want the art in. Are you going to use a template where you can easily change the colors, while keeping the same lines- or are you going to do everyone hand drawn? If your answer is hand drawn, skip to step 4.

Step 2: Draw your art. Flat lines, no shading on the drawings. Youll be adding shading digitally. Scan the art, get it in a digital format so you can work with it.

Step 3: Inking and shading. You may wish to hire someone for this step, or do it yourself. Most owners find it is best to have inked lines, shading, and highlights on thier own seperate layers in the template. Photoshop or GIMP have tutorials on layering, Im not going to go into that. The reason to keep layers seperate, is in case you wish to make edits or add mutations later, its a bit easier.

Step 4: Color a bunch of premades. You want to have enough to giveaway/sell without finding yourself overwealmed if you are more popular than you expected.

Step 5: Host events. You will want to do something fun to keep fans interested. Events can be free or have a fee, up to you. You need to have time and be available for any events you start. Flakeyness will make the most wonderfull art fail as adoptables.

Step 6: Be patient, and dont take things personal. Some adoptables fail. Its not your fault. Sometimes fans have school, work, ect that just makes the time you introduce them not right.

I think that about covers it? Feel free to add to this anyone!

[IvySpring]

Hi- I'm new here, and I'm starting to figure out how the adopties work, etc, and I've slowly been reading and learning how to start stuff up- my question I guess just needs an add on to this post. How do most people do breedings here, or I guess just make the crits in general? I've noticed a lot of people have their own adopties, but then they hire different colorists/shaders/cert-makers, etc? Why is that? Is there anybody here that strictly runs their own adoptable and does the coloring, etc. or is there a reason that more than one person works on a specific adoptable?
As for the breeding question- I guess could somebody explain to me the most common way people do it around here? Does anybody on here use genetics at all, or is it just a look at the parents, color the babies sort of thing?
And as for coloring/making crits- could somebody explain the whole certificate thing? I'm sort of confused as to how that part of this whole program works.. is there a purpose for certificates in adoptables? Are they required? And if so, what sort of stuff does a creator usually put on their crits certificates?
Thanks so much for any help for the poor newbie >_<

[Ember]

@ Ivyspring

I'll start with why people sometimes get others to help them out.  The simple fact is that some adoptable runners are only able to do certain aspects of their adoptable. For example, some people can draw and colour but not shade so they may hire someone to add a shading template for them. Some are capable of doing everything. The only one that I know off-hand are Air~fish and FaeKind, though I'm sure there are others on here.

With breeding its all up to the runner. There are some adoptables on here that do have genetics and what not and others that do just random. The Kennel, Cattery, and Stable all use real genetics, and FaeKind again have their own genetics to do with mutations and such. People use both ways often.

As for certificates, they're mainly used to identify the name of that individual adoptable and the owner. Other things can include parents, ID number, breed, etc..

[red_uni387]

critters are basically just pieces of art, recolored to make them different people can make their own adoptie, but some people just don't have teh skills to draw, ink, shade, color, and/or make a cert, so they hire others to do so for them. Plus, more than one person working makes the job get done faster and more critters would be avaliable for adoption.
The Stable and The Gene Pool use genetics, I personally look at the parents and pick colors XD
certs are just so no one can take the picture and say it's theirs. If I had a plain picture of a cookie, you could take it and say it's yours. But if it had a little blurb that said 'owned by red_uni' you couldn't say it's yours. usually a name, gender, and owner go on the cert, but I've seen some include hexes

[Solistia]

@Ivy, I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge, though understand it's from how I do things, and different adoptables may do things differently :3

The reason for hiring extra colorists is to help expand teh adoptable. One person can only do so much themselves, and having an extra hand (or two, or ten) will allow the owner to focus on other aspects of the shops, instead of having to be constantly churning out new pets. On this particular site, it's a bit more relaxed, as the community base is smaller, but larger sites like PI, and even larger GaiaOnline, have huge adoptable communities, and if you can't keep up, you'll find your adoptablte not doing well at all.

For breeding, the way I suualy do it, I'll randomize a number between 1-100, to see if they take after their mohter or father more, then incorproate features from both. If the the baby is 3rd generation or more, I'll also take a look at their grand parents and so on to have some features of previous generations pop up. Since most of the pets were colored by me in the first place, I havea good idea of their design, and how to splice them and put them on the offsping =D

As far as certs, in a sense, they are required, otherwise it would just be selling "art". Having the cert gives the pet a name and ownership, and gives the owner rights to their pet (such as RolePlaying, breeding, and other shop features). Having a Certificate makes it "Official" in a sense :3

[IvySpring]

Ok, Thanks so much for all of your help! One more question- with the Kennel and how they use real genetics, do they have the genetics listed somewhere that when they do a breeding they can go reference and see what the parent's genetics are? Or is it something where they are posted on the dogs cert? I haven't seen any Kennel genetics anywhere as a reference, so that's why I was wondering.
Thanks again! Your answers all helped a lot :] I appreciate it

[Ember]

Normally you just look at a dog and figure out its coat colour fro mthat, though if its difficult TheKennel staff are always willing to let you know what the dog is. Also, when puppies are born they normally tell you what they are too. The staff have all the genetic info they need when you apply for a breeding, which is why its not on the certs.

[Lectral]

I was primary colorist responsible for breeding before the move to Secundi, and while I am currently taking a small break from it, I will say the Kennel is only loosely based on real genetics *(real coat colors and patterns, yes, actual genetics, not so much) - we do not actually use a genetic code.  My method for breedings involved approximate percentages for patterns and colors, based on the parents' colors/patterns.  I am not sure on the other colorists' precise methods, but I imagine it is similar

*it is very hard to use actual/true genetics when many of our dogs do not have true dog patterns, as several of our customs have been based on non-canines, even when we discouraged such patterns XD

[Ravvana]

Ok, Thanks so much for all of your help! One more question- with the Kennel and how they use real genetics, do they have the genetics listed somewhere that when they do a breeding they can go reference and see what the parent's genetics are? Or is it something where they are posted on the dogs cert? I haven't seen any Kennel genetics anywhere as a reference, so that's why I was wondering.
Thanks again! Your answers all helped a lot :] I appreciate it

I run TheStable, and all of the horses in this adoptable have "real" genetics. I give every horse a genetic phenotype; I type it up on the cert, but use the "hide" feature in PSP to make sure that the actual genetic string isn't available when I upload the images. So I can view all the horses' genetics in PSP, but nobody else can see the genetics When two horses breed, I use the parents' genetic coding to determine what the foal will look like and what genes he will carry.

Here is our basic genetic guide for the horses:
http://stable.colbyforkicks.com/genetics.html

[IvySpring]

Ok, That makes sense- now sorry, I don't want to sound stupid (I'm just trying to learn how all of this works) but say for TheStable- with your genetics, say you're breeding a cream horse with a roan horse (so their codes would be CC and RR correct?) Now when you punnet square those and mix them, the foals coding would be CR, but that's not a coded genetic color on the list of genetics.. so how exactly does that work when your mixing the codes and trying to get the resulting colors? Or is there another way to combine those two codes so that you either get CC or RR for the foals?

[Ravvana]

Each piece of coding is separate

A horse with dominant cream could be either CC (cremello/perlino/smoky cream) or Cc (palomino, buckskin, smoky black). Unless this horse also has visible roan, it would have the rr roan gene.

A horse with dominant roan could be either RR or Rr, but both would look the same -- the roaning shows as long as there is at least one big R. Unless this horse also has visible cream, it would have the cc cream gene.

When I breed these two, the roan gene crosses with the roan gene, and the cream gene crosses with the cream gene. So the foal could be Rr (roaning) or rr (solid), and, separately, it could be Cc (cream) or cc (not cream). Two punnett squares would be needed in this example With all said and done, just looking at these two genes, the foal could be:
1) Visible cream, visible roan
2) Visible cream, no roaning
3) No cream, visible roan
4) No cream, no roaning

Depending on the specific genes of the parents and the luck of random.org

[IvySpring]

Ahhhhhh, ok I see! I'm starting to get it haha thanks muchly!