Post by Cussbeard on Jan 29, 2009 20:49:06 GMT -5
This might pique interest in the couple wenches we got here.
In the past couple of milestones, the character team and our graphics programmer have been working to make our female avatars less masculine.
The reason that this has been an issue is because of a choice, made long ago, to have only one skeleton shared between both men and women avatar models. The reasoning behind the choice was one of savings, both in the production pipeline and in the memory footprint of the game. With only one skeleton, we would only need one set of animations and not one for each skeleton—less work for animators on the back end and a smaller animation database in the game. The price for this savings was a compromise to have either masculine looking women (broad shoulders, no hips), feminine looking men, or blah looking both. We went for masculine looking women and while the character team did their best to feminize our broad-shouldered, slim-hipped women, they were never satisfied with the results.
Now that the game has been live for some time, we’ve set out to fixing things that have made us unhappy. When I sat down with the character team they unanimously remarked that the most frustrating character issue was the masculine bodied women.
Our graphics dev took a look at the issue and found a way to reduce the shoulder width programmatically, which did a lot to emasculate the women, so to speak, and the character team revisited the female waists and shaved a bit of bulk off them. Below is a before/after comparison.
We are encouraged by the results we now see in the game and hope you agree that the women look more naturally feminine.
In the past couple of milestones, the character team and our graphics programmer have been working to make our female avatars less masculine.
The reason that this has been an issue is because of a choice, made long ago, to have only one skeleton shared between both men and women avatar models. The reasoning behind the choice was one of savings, both in the production pipeline and in the memory footprint of the game. With only one skeleton, we would only need one set of animations and not one for each skeleton—less work for animators on the back end and a smaller animation database in the game. The price for this savings was a compromise to have either masculine looking women (broad shoulders, no hips), feminine looking men, or blah looking both. We went for masculine looking women and while the character team did their best to feminize our broad-shouldered, slim-hipped women, they were never satisfied with the results.
Now that the game has been live for some time, we’ve set out to fixing things that have made us unhappy. When I sat down with the character team they unanimously remarked that the most frustrating character issue was the masculine bodied women.
Our graphics dev took a look at the issue and found a way to reduce the shoulder width programmatically, which did a lot to emasculate the women, so to speak, and the character team revisited the female waists and shaved a bit of bulk off them. Below is a before/after comparison.
We are encouraged by the results we now see in the game and hope you agree that the women look more naturally feminine.
