#but i looked up texture refs to use so then i just gotta dig out bibo's diffuse maps

[lesenbyan]

Oh yes right, tomorrow is for fucking with diffuses to see if I can give Cyn her scars

[sparrow-in-boots]

So here I am, gathering references for my Desmond study, as one does, and I reach AC3. I brace myself for impact because I have the original un-mastered version, and I find the remaster flattens the models too much and kinda, plastifies them?? which makes figuring out dimensions hard. So I gotta deal with, a lot of lighting and rendering bullshit instead. Fun all around.

I start the game and get to screenshooting, and I notice Desmond has some drastic pale palms going on. Like, oddly so. I shrug it off for now, but then I notice that Bill Miles also has them. And, Shaun? Some more gameplay in and we reach Haytham and, he has the same stark pale palms situation going on. Ngl, I'm baffled.

Speaking of averages and my own observations, people with pale skin don't get that stark pale palms even when they tan. They get some faint distinction, but it's mostly from a tanning gradient, the undersides of your arms don't get as exposed to sunlight so less tan. Meanwhile people with naturally brown skin do have distinct pale palms that clashes even with their own tanning gradient.

Now, I know for a fact Haytham doesn't have enough melanin in him to have naturally brown skin, that's a white man. He might not burn in the sun but c'mon, this feels too stark. Not only that, but the skintone just, don't match? Their hands are too red undertoned while Haytham's and Desmond's faces are much less so.

So I decide to do some digging. Now, I have no know-how on how to rip assets in games and god forbid, translate them to something like Blender. But I do know that machinimas were big back in the day, and that includes a lot of AC character models being used for gifs and videos and such, so I delve into DA for some model refs. And indeed, I find them, and...

Yeah, that's not the same skintone. And after looking at some other screenshots online, even in game the skintone is very much not a match. So what's up with that?

It turns out that as far as I can tell, Ubi did about three skintones (pale, brown and dark) for each gender, by modifying a base skin texture's levels or smth, thus why the palms are so stark. They used the same skintone for the native npcs, Connor, Haytham, Bill, and Desmond. Likewise, Ziio and Prudence share the same skin texture. Which, royally sucks for reference taking, despite being a fairly common game dev trick to shrink asset production.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere really, I'm simply annoyed. ACR very much whitewashed Desmond, but AC3 did um... something alright.