Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback All BG3 Heads Shown Together (visual)

Hehe yeah I mean, will Larian achieve my ideal? It seems unlikely, though I suppose you could take it as like an opening negotiation - aim high and expect a counter offer much lower, maybe we get lucky somewhere in between?

The reason I mention the ~125-250 number is because people who study facial morphology phenotypes have basically broken down the broader variety we see in the world into categories that round out at right around that number. If you've ever seen that idealized geometric "Golden Phi Mask" (which is supposed to map the "Perfect Face" into symmetrical proportions) there are basically 125 versions of that, when you move from the most reductive possible mask conceivable towards something that actually covers the true morphology of actual human faces. In other words some geometric masks for the many "actual faces" as opposed to one mask for "the perfect face." The Golden Phi is useful in art and in composition, but only as an abstraction and as generic guide. It helps the artist to build some symmetry scaffolding, and tells them when they are way off veering into caricature or disproportion, but it doesn't serve as a particularly useful model for describing the broad variety, since virtually any face can fit into it lol.

Speaking of the lifehack, I'm glad you included that image of the palette! It reminds me of another point I found a bit frustrating while working on this presentation. Rather than using a sensible system for naming their colors like HEX, or Munsell, or something of that sort, they instead went with the names that remind me of House Paints. You know, where instead of giving us a White Tint that has an actual value scale, they'll call it something arbitrary and confusing like "Swiss Coffee."  So we have the same thing going on in this game in many places with colors like "Fey 1, Efreeti 3, Decay 2 etc." Which makes the color swatches annoying to reference. The reason they do that stuff to sell house paint or makeup etc is to confuse costumers with a layer of obfuscating language, so they need to consult a "specialist" to decipher the silly naming conventions and unlock the secrets of the color codex. For people who actually want to understand what's going on, they'll describe colors in terms of Hue and Saturation and Value and use the standardized reference language developed by artists and technicians over the years to describe how color works in terms of either a visible light scheme or a pigment scheme. It's part of why I wanted to start with a limited palette here, but also just because doing that makes it easier to chart the values and see where there are undercolors bleeding through on each individual head model.

Anyhow, below are all the Females in complete profile... I used Ochre 3 for the skintone this time and Yellow 6 for hair. The eye color doesn't matter much from this view, since the Iris will always reflect blue in this position. It's part of the frustration of setting the character creator in an actual scene with restricted lighting and restricted camera angles that we can't manipulate in any way unfortunately, but we do the best we can with what's available I guess.

This Profile view is probably the most instructive for seeing the overall morphology at a glance, but also the least useful in the actual game. This is because the game is so very cinematic, and the full profile shot is pretty rare in that format. Typically the character is shown in some form of 3/4 view, but I still wanted to include it for completion. You will notice that from this view, we get less of the "same face" effect, but again the variation we see here is a bit deceptive, because the game's cinematography doesn't make use of this view very often. What carries through into the 3/4 view is more relevant to our experience. As a final aside, this definitely isn't the amazing haircut thread lol. I'm not really trying to embarrass them or anything, but you'll still see a lot of clipping into the ears in various places. This could be pretty easily worked around if we could just change the ear models independently, but since we can't and since so many haircuts don't work for everyone, I didn't feel compelled to hold back much. The Tiefs again ran into the wall of limited options. For something so important to the initial first impression, they've kicked the can on it quite a bit, and seem to be prioritizing Gith and Dwarves and whatnot, over the Humans, and other stuff over char creation and GUI which is really where they should start for the clean up. I'm not super attached to Larian as a developer, but definitely am to FR and D&D and BG, so I want them to be as strong out the gate as possible just for the love of the franchise.

Humans





Also, I got a couple attachments left so, here is the stack effect using a more classic limited palette...

Since I gave the Gith such short shrift at the outset I'll use them to highlight. Like a Rembrandt or Vermeer or Rubens! but not really lol. It's more like trying to get this done between waiting for the laundry to dry or running errands or walking my dog. But gives a quick read, and so hopefully is a little helpful hehe...