#in that you can't exactly ask an animal model to stand still like a human model

[yunisverse]

A little while back you posted something about an art teacher breathing a sigh of relief because of the different art style you were using - possibly compared to the rest of the art class at the time. Something about a style of illustration?

I wasn't sure what that meant in an art way.

Ah yes, this post!

The animal drawing class I was in was all illustration majors; as a result, their impulse was to try and draw each subject with as much detail and as beautifully rendered as possible. They'd spend the class trying to draw one or two really pretty drawings of a horse.

I, as the lone animation major, was more focused on gestural drawings--drawings that were very loose, that focused on line of action, the general shapes that make up the anatomy of the animal, etc. By the end of class I'd gone through several pages getting as many drawings as I could done.

Like the comic says in the post where I brought it up, there's nothing wrong with either style--they're just two different artistic strengths! My teacher was just happy to see someone doing something different from the rest of the class.

[appelsiinilight]

Tbh, from where I’m sitting (on my high “tried out proper 3D character and outfit modeling earlier this year” horse)… it’s not even actually that hard?? Like, I guess it’s extra work, but it wouldn’t have been called “extra” if it was considered important and planned for from the start >:/

Adjusting a "standard" character sculpt/model into a few different body types ain’t that hard, 'cause once you have the base you're just moving stuff around here and there. No need to change hands or feet or ears much, so that a 70% pain-in-the-ass reduction. You've got the symmetry tool on. It wouldn't even be cutting corners, that's just the standard 3D workflow asdfsdfghfgh

Then, tailoring the same clothing to different body meshes, even if there's a few dozen of those, is frankly just not difficult. The design is done, the 3D object is complete, you don't have to model anything else, you just move stuff around. MAYBE some outfits would need some more tailoring - but that's still adjusting an existing asset.

More variations requires more quality control hours, but that's about it; it's not like all the options you are presented with during character creation are in any way a strain on the rendering engine during game time, it still only has to render one player character!

Basically, the 3D artists' "It's just too difficult to model different body types (and facial features and hair options etc etc etc) :(" is exactly the same lie as 2D artists' "It's just too difficult to draw women that aren't Elsa from Frozen :(", just with a plausible "there's technical issues a layperson wouldn't know enough about to dispute" explanation baked in. Both of those groups COULD draw/model literally anything, they just don't care and don't want to (create diverse protagonists - both, for example, have fat villains nailed down, somehow, despite all the technical issues 🤔)

This is getting off the customizable game protagonists topic and onto grittier 3D character creation particulars, but has anyone else noticed how 3D characters basically always have thigh gaps? 2D artists certainly love drawing them too, but with 3D it's literally a 100% occurrence rate. Po from Kung Fu Panda and the humans from Wall-e (obligatory Yikes) have thigh gaps.

This IS - actually - (In Part) - due to technical issues. But,,,,,,

I ran into this technical issue when working on the aforementioned character model earlier this year. I was not going to model a fucking thigh gap, but I did realize why it's standard; basically, for animation, the legs have to be entirely separate from each other, only connecting to the pelvis. Compare to boobs, which even in horny 3D media don't lift up from the chest even when bouncing - it still looks fine, so there's just no need to model the skin at the boob-chest intersection, so there's only a crease to create the illusion. Legs do need to separate from each other constantly, so you can't just model the crease - there has to be skin (3D mesh) there.

You can't just model a genuine squish - that's deforming the mesh to a specific pose (character standing perfectly still with their legs at shoulder width), which is antithetical to modeling for animation. All the squishing should be done by the animators, matched to every frame of every pose. They CAN'T be asked to undo that hypothetical default squish for 97% of the frames.

You could model the thighs as intersecting meshes - e.i. both unsquished, and the masses that normally squish together instead clipping into each other. This does genuinely severely fuck with the workflow, though. Like, it could be done, probably, but that would actually be extra hours of working against the 3D modeling program for no good reason. I imagine rigging would also be extra hard with the intersections. There IS a reason 3D characters' bodies have no real creases. Both the artist AND the 3D program need all of the "outside" to actually be outside (e.i. the intersecting insides of thighs would be "inside" each other and fuck with everything) at every step of the workflow.

...You know where else this problem pops up? Armpits. (And arms laying flat against the sides of the body in general.)

...You ever notice how 3D characters' default poses always have the arms out at a 90° (T-pose) or a 45° (a more natural A-pose) angle? That's to avoid the intersection/squish issue! Easy to model, easy to add the squish when needed.

Now, I genuinely at first thought, surely it can't be that simple. There must be a reason everyone else is still modeling thigh gaps. If there was such an intuitive workaround, surely at least someone, somewhere, would have already utilized it?...

You can A-pose the legs. Vitruvian Man-style. And then the thighs don't touch. And there's no problem anymore. And when the texturing and rigging is done, just as you can lower the arms, you can put the legs back together. And then there's no gap.

All those other fuckers literally just don't try dfgsdfghdfghj

@not-a-space-alien and I were trying to make my OC Addison in Baldur's Gate and we discovered a critical flaw in the ability to make trans characters

While you can put any style of genitals on any style of body, you're still limited to faces that "match" the gender of the body

This meant in order to give them a face that actually looked like them, I had to use the "woman" body, which is, like, not ideal. Although Nasa told me the "man" bodies are all jacked af, which wouldn't really have fit the character either.

I feel like a game with a character customization screen should have three models for a character:

thin and petite

tall and muscular

fat

like, yeah, that doesn't cover EVERY possible shape a human body can be, but you can at least get closer instead of all women being petite and all men being tall and muscular

You don't even have to make most of the clothing and wearable items different based on whether the player character is "tall and muscular (male)" or "tall and muscular (female)." Only a small selection of the most revealing clothing would have to be different.