I love the idea of someone expecting to be booped with a camera so they insert a thin glass vial filled with fake blood in their suit nose, so when someone boops them, they can grab their suit nose and go, 'Aaagh! My node! You broge by node!' as they seemingly get a bloody nose.
This would be iterative engineering design.
intelligent iterative engineering design
Arms race between fursuit noses and camera lenses when?
More or less, yeah.
Fabrics and polyurethane foam used to be the only options for fursuits, but this started shifting over the last 10 years or so. Some enterprising furries started molding components like teeth, claws, and noses from soft rubber materials, which experienced a brief renaissance before hard plastic 3d-printed parts started supplanting the more labor-intensive custom molded pieces.
At the time when this was posted, hard plastic parts had become common for new fursuits, but now that 3d printers can use TPU and other flexible materials, they've become the new standard. Many fursuit makers actually use this technique to print the whole frame of the fursuit head, making them more durable while also improving airflow over the old-style carved polyurethane foam head bases;
A pic of an old-style carved polyurethane foam head base. 
A pic of a new-style 3d printed TPU head base.
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Could you address the booping context?
That feels like part of the joke to me, I've never heard of someone's nose getting damaged by a camera boop. XD
i feel like it's not a "i damaged my nose" but a "your nose had a hard bit on it that scratched lens on my iphone when we were trying to take a selfie" combined with the "we damaged our noses booping them together too hard". i dunno, outside looking in.
I'm probably missing some context here as well. Camera boops feel like a meme from a short-form video site like Vine or TikTok, which I don't have any direct experience with.
if you're going to do camera boops, wouldn't you want to, idk, make your nose out of... suede or something nooooo veloour fuck i think you just awoke something in me
Nice ref!
i got one of them secret labs chairs back when they had velour pillows and omg that has been so nice for being bald. it has saved my skull from getting clawed by my cat when i try for cat hats (tax paid below). btw, now that i have had the thought, gonna go put on my cat hat.
I always found it weird how fursuit snoots widen as they expand forward, unlike the animals they depict. I know it enhances the cartoony look, but it looks too exaggerated for my dumb tastes
There are realistically proportioned fursuit heads too, they look AWESOME
This is so cool. Shit like this is why I love being in community with furries, despite not being one myself. I'm always awed by the creativity
(Plus furries always throw the best parties)
I love it too, especially with how quickly the community evolves. New techniques catch on and spread like wildfire, and we make a great indicator species for the health of online spaces.
(Can confirm about the parties too =3)
*pawed
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Lol, I don't have one, but I post on Lemmy a lot, so there's that. =3
Thanks for sharing this info, because you've given me some interesting ideas to ponder. My personal craft domain is garment making, and in recent years, I've been having a lot of fun exploring stuff that exists in the space between "clothing" and "costume". I don't have much experience in 3D printing, so the stuff about 3D printing flexible materials like TPU is new to me. I should explore this more, because I bet I could make some awesome stuff with this method (such as in corsetry)
Definitely do look into this, and check out some of the work folks are already doing with combining fabrics and 3d printing. =D
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What the other two people said
I gained this unwanted knowledge involuntarily, but am more cultured for it.
Could you imagine having to take your thousand dollar fursuit head to a shop for repairs after only a few outings? I’d be pissed.
I should have assumed, but I am just now realizing the suits cost that much and that there are infact fursuit repair shops. I would have thought it was going into a fabric store.... Living over here in my isolated ignorance I guess lol
(Comically I had to go back and edit pursuit to fursuit because it wasn't in my phones standard diction)
They've been around a long time actually. Somebody had to make mascot costumes, and i imagine that skillset translates pretty well to fursuits
Mascots are just commercially acceptable fursonas
Mascots are corporate / sports fursonas.
And the people behind those corporate fursonas hate it. Horny furries drove cereal mascot Tony the Tiger off of Twitter. XD
Gritty on the other hand....
Horny furries got Tony the Tiger off?? 👀
They're expensive for the same kind of reasons that getting a tailor to custom make a normal suit from scratch would be expensive. Takes a lot of labor and only a relatively small pool of people have the relevant skills, plus some of the material costs add up.
This is a big part of why I love being in community with furries, despite not being one myself.
I've done a lot of bespoke clothing making — mostly for myself, but occasionally I've done things on commission. People are often astounded at how much high quality craftsmanship costs when the skilled labour is properly compensated.
I once wore a €20,000 dress (it was rented for me by a girlfriend so I could attend a swanky event with her). Before we went out, I was poring over all the construction details, desperate to learn all I could from this absurd scenario I had found myself in. I remember feeling weirdly dismayed to learn that there wasn't a single thing in that dress that would be beyond my own skill level. Instead, it was just countless little hand finished details that must've taken an inordinate amount of time and care to do. For example, all the seam allowances catch stitched down (whenever they weren't fully enclosed in a french seam or similar). Truly high quality items take time, and can't be easily automated. Sure, there are components that can be optimised with computers or machines, but it requires a skilled human to actually integrate all this into the completed piece.
I have a friend who uses to draw furry porn, and she said she found the experience to be super artistically liberating, because for the first time in her artistic career, she had people haggling her prices up, because she was way underpricing her works. On average, furries seem to have a greater level of respect for the time and skill that goes into making custom things, which I love. My friend is now making art in a domain that's closer to her own personal artistic interests, but she says that she will always cherish the time she spent in the furry community, because it gave her the confidence she needed to advocate for the value of her art and her skills when she was chasing her dreams.
That sort of wardrobe malfunction is not terribly uncommon since fursuit-making is still mostly a cottage industry where each piece is a one-off custom, but most reputable fursuit-makers offer a limited-time warranty to cover minor alterations and repairs.
Furry conventions also usually have someone offering repair services (sometimes even for free) in the dealer's den in addition to the tables selling everything from parts and accessories to entire pre-made fullsuits.
Why are people booping with camera lenses?
selfies?
I suppose some ILCs could be used for selfies, but why would it be described as booping?
i'm guessing it's a furry thing. when i kiss my cat with my nose (or i guess my niblings but i see my cats more often) i call it booping
Hard to tell how close you are with a snout you can't feel maybe
You can remove that little tip from bus hammers and glue them to the noses in order to instantly shatter any glass like material that comes into contact with it. Allegedly.
Really only for tempered glass like car windows. Regular glass would just get a little ding.
A little ding is enough to render a camera lens pretty useless.
A cracked lens still takes pictures pretty well without any visual artefacts
Most lenses only care about the angular light distribution, essentially averaging over the lens surface. So a ding or crack would just add a tiny portion of grey or black to the entire image
Edit: This is for cracking the front protective glass of a camera lens. If an actual optical lens splits in two it will be misaligned and bad things will happen.
lamarck has entered the chat
Pretty sure the nose on mine might not withstand repeated boops, but depends on what they're made out of. Someone already pointed out something to the extent of how there is more choice in what material is used to make the suit. So, kinda depends on material used.
I'm pretty sure I've seen in the past at least a few suits on the more expensive side using actual hard, boop resistant, materials for the nose. Couldn't tell you the material since I'm not an expert.
Edit: more about 3D printed suit bases instead of just more materials. Whoops.
dude idk. like, it depends. some folk, they still have some proprioception in their fursuits. some people, they take is as license to mosh and smash into people and "oops i couldn't tell where i was". I was in a mummer's play a few christmases. i played the dragon one year. Had to build the suit because the person who played it the previous year stole it. Made the head out of... fuck i can't even remember. A can? half inch foam? a hula hoop? some fabric and some makeup? I was inspired by Gamera but I think people thought ninja turtles. It was sturdy, must've looked pretty decent too because when i checked out the show 20 years later they were still using my shitty old dragon suit, just theseus'd with a few repairs.
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