Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Create Tough, Manly Male Characters

Everybody run! Whaaaa! :P

I admit, you found me out

He looks incredibly badass while holding a big ass longsword, too!

...Which pains me a little, since he sucks at using it.

I in turn feel his pain, my RL sword prowess so far including walking into it while it was out of its scabbard; dropping it on my foot; and sneezing on it and only remembering to clean it up once it had developed little rust spots.

I wonder how much design effort it takes to adapt armour onto different 3D model body types? I'm an artist, I did a little bit of 3D animation waaaaayyyy back in art college - but that was years ago, and everything has changed now.
Currently we have the same underlying 3D male body model for most male characters, PC or NPC. I honestly haven't made a male character so I don't know the differences between human males and elf males, for example, if any, but if we compare, say, Astarion to, say, Gale, the size differences are minor if any. Obviously Astarion has his custom scars but that's a custom skin over the same base 3D model.

ANYWAY and then we have Halsin, who is noticeably different in muscle tone and size. His Druid armour looks very good on him though, not "stretched" as the graphics might be when simply plopped over a different 3D body frame. So, I wonder if the designers are working in the background on adapting how different armour looks when applied to different body types, and the option to create muscular Halsin-type player characters will come out later when it's ready?

Depends. I'm not a professional modeller (in fact I'm barely an amateur) so my experiences are limited, especially with industry-standard software, but it can be a case of just stretching a given model to fit so you have the small and large extremes, which is Skyrim's approach, to completely different body types which involve pretty much making it from scratch for each one. They have their pros and cons; the stretching can look weird as it will be compounded as the character moves, though some careful design should theoretically avert it or at least make it not too obvious; completely different models can be tailored to the character type in question in much the same way as light, medium and heavy armours look different (even if the underlying model is the same) but obviously the effort involved quickly ramps up.

There's effort and effort, though. It's a lot less effort for an experienced modeller with professional software than it is for my one-vertex-at-a-time approach in Blender!

Believe it or not, in the majority of smaller studios, Blender is the major 3D software, and it is definately professional level. In the larger studios, there is also ZBrush, but if you learn Blender, you can use most other major software bundles with very little transition. It mostly comes down to sculpting experience, and the familiarity of the tools and hotkeys. Personally, I have found sculpting to be easier for modeling rather than vertex. Not to mention, Blender works very well with Unreal. It has incredible built in tools for clothing, physics etc. It is definitely a different ball game from my days in 3DSM 10 years ago.

I am female irl. And I generally like to play attractive female chars of all different types…petite elves with sparkling eyes and youthful faces, tall slender rangers with shocking red hair, gnarled warrior women with Mowhawks and scars. I personally like a ridiculous amount of skin hair and eye colors and LOADS of hair options. Skin and hair mods are usually the very first thing I do in an rpg like this to make sure I have options for multiple distinct play throughs.

And I gotta say…trying to create what I would consider an attractive female in BG3 has been pretty easy, despite limited face options at present. However, trying to create a hawt grizzled dude as their dream companion? Not easy at all. I can create a smooth faced elf with curly hair, and a youthful roguish dude with a sly mustache. But an attractive grizzled warrior? Nope.

Also…where are the strong noses? I love to make male chars with a strong slavic noses, or ones that look broken. Usually what I focus on most for male chars (no idea why), with beards as 2nd most important.

So yes…agree with poster. As a woman, I TOO would like to be able to create a grizzled older guy in the game.

No one should be arguing that more isn't more, when it comes to character customization.

You can create all your armors on a basemesh and apply the surface deform modifier. Create blendshapes of your different body types on the basemesh and all your surfaced deformed armors will automatically deform to fit.

I usually use procedural textures or tiled textures for the base material whenever I can, and just use decals with image textures all over the model to create detail. Not only does this allow for good resolution on closeups without insane 32k image textures, but it also reduces stretching in the textures when deforming. If you are using image textures though, just fine-tune the UVs for each body shape before exporting the FBX for that version of the armor.

Also, Blender is as professional as anything out there. Check out the CGI in Man in the High Castle.

Oh, yeah, I hope it didn't look like I was dis'ing Blender or anything like that. I was thinking more in terms of the overall workflow, some of which may only exist in my imagination as vaguely wondrous things, and in Larian's case they're using RAD's Granny 3D stuff AFAIK. But the biggest tool in any modeller's arsenal is knowledge and that's what I sorely lack: the one-vertex-at-a-time approach (usually with various types of fall-off) has been enough to let me scrape by for 15 years' worth of meddling with other people's models and occasionally creating my own but sculpting and whatever you call the thing where you apply the same deform to multiple models are completely beyond my understanding. I feel I should've learnt a bit more in that time but my experience with modelling tends to be "argh" and then "I'm glad that's over!" once I'm finally where I need to be so I've never really developed it further.

The pain was multiplied with games like Dragon Age Oranges and Ego Draconis that needed three models for various detail levels because in Blender 2.49 trying to do a poly reduce usually resulted in a lot of repair work to fix anomalies that were obvious even at a distance. It's a lot less painful in never versions but still a bit of a faff overall. I suspect there's ways of automating it and scripting stuff is my usual approach to repetitive tasks but I predicted potentially more frustration than it would save me...

One thing I always found would be interesting is if as your character levels, gains strength, constitution, battles enemies, etc, if that showed on your character. This would be a BIG undertaking, but for every battle, if your char got hit, there would be a chance of a random scar or mark to show up. As you level, and let's say, you up your strength score to give you another bonus when attack, your char looked a bit bulkier or wiry. Things like that. Changes that adventuring would bring naturally. Again, not expecting it, but would be interesting to see. Almost like a visual representation of the trials and tribulations your char has gone through on their adventures. First level chars are going to be a bit scrawny (by adventuring standards) due to their inexperience. As they level and grow, those indications of a veteran will begin to take shape.

I like the idea of your stats having an effect on your body type. A STR 20 human should look like he has a few dump stats.

I dont ... :-/
One of things i specificly dont like about Henry Cavill playing Geralt is his musculature ... i mean they kinda did good job with his costume, since it kinda masks most of it, unless that half-naked scenes ... but its specificly told in books that: "The geralt was sinewy rather than muscular."
(hope its right word, used google for that sentence)
And i would hate to see my "sinewy" character to turn into hulk, just bcs i use Str as main stat. :-/

Also, if you are creating Str. based character, you are allready starting with 15-17 Str ...
I dont quite believe that those few more points should make your muscles any bulkier. O_o

If he's sinewy then he must have some Dex, right? I also don't think a STR 20 "human" should look like a STR 20 "elf" (or mutant) because there's more going on there than merely a life of hard living. Same as how people often confuse attractiveness with Charisma.

I'd put it this way. Bruce Lee, a good example of someone at peak human fitness, I would gauge as having a STR of 16

I'm also reminded of casting Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd; whatever one's other criticisms of the film (and there are many), he was absolutely the wrong guy for the role. Dredd was never supposed to be young(ish) and muscular, he was intended to be a Dirty Harry Of The Future™, if anything older and nastier, but someone who dispensed justice by wit (and firepower), not physical strength.

Okay, strictly speaking, the character was named after Judge Dread, a reggae musician whose amusingly vulgar lyrics predated Viz, but y'know.

Er anyway, that's not that I agree with the basic premise that there should be different body types, just not necessarily automatically selected based on stats. That's one of the things I didn't especially like about the Fable series, for instance.

I too think, different body types are a great addition, but better not make them based on stats.
I liked Henry Cavill as Geralt, despite him not looking the part. He played the role well. I long have learned, that characters will look very different on screen.

We do not speak of the Stallone Judge Dredd movie! The only movie that exists is the Dredd movie with Karl Urban.

Thank you for that, watching it again now. Really good stuff. Karl Urban, so good. Next watching The Boys again.

The character creator needs more options period. I mean everyone is basically a medium size generic character in the creator when you see helsin even if you were a bad ass fighter with 20 str in the current build your going to feel dwarfed. Characters need more stout and brutish appearance options especially for when barbarian hits the game. Having height and frame of build options would be at a minimum nice to see in the game.

Like what if i wanted to build a portly character to enjoy the game more robust. Or a Brick Wall of a character looking like he was carved from stone with a chisel to make the ladies drool. Or another character who was Skinny and sleeky maybe that book worm or that agile and nimble theif in a back ally way there are not options.

Or i wanted a girl who was more amazon. Or a beach ball on legs like the fat princess. Or a pair of gazongas that were obsurd. Its not to say id want to make a character like that but when your role playing your characters appearance is something that matters to alot of people so it is something people do need more options for and one of the weaker aspects of the character creator.

Other Faults include no option to roll stats. Lack of options for starting equipment. In comparison to solastas. Not to say that that is the ideal system because there character creator has weaknesses but the lack of customization is a dissappointment in bg 3. While the asthetics are amazing the character creator is one of bg3 weakest points. I am also very dissappointed with no options for different starting equipment or stat rolling on the higher end of the spectrum.

For all the pluses that do exist for bg 3 the character creator is one of the games weakest points. Also the lack of male voice options / female voice options is the lowest of any crpg currently out there the customization options are really really low.