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

No you picked up on it exactly Dex, that's why I stuck the desaturated palette right next to the regular one to make it simpler to parse. The main point was more how it's not organized by Hue, but also how having the value gradients for the Hues break across the line disguises when we shift from 10 options at the start to fewer (only 8) later for the hues at the bottom. My first thought was 'why did they choose a 12 column presentation for a 10 value gradient?' but you can sort of see why if the idea to is to hide the fact that they're dropping 2 values halfway down the palette. My other thought was that perhaps they did it this way because the first palette is labelled "Skin" and they didn't want to privilege the lightest or darkest values by having one or the other always be the leftmost box in the grid. So by always breaking the Hue/Values across 2 rows the way they did, the lightest value shifts position across the palette in a diagonal sweep as you descend. It's possible they made it this way recognizing that skin color can be a fraught subject if the organization appears to favor one value over another constantly. Or it's possible it was just accidental, because the designer wanted to create an impression of movement, and to avoid a more standard rainbow or spectrum just to be different from everyone else lol.

When you expand or collapse the "Show All Colors" tab, you get a different arrangement based on the selected race, which is what I meant by everything resetting. You can see it clearly if you move from say Race: High Elf to Race: Drow, in the later case the row showing the coolest blues moves from where it's located at the top of the full palette down to the bottom in the more limited Drow spread.

Something like this will happen with each different Race chosen. Some limited palettes are more expansive than others too, So Tieflings have the largest palette set and the most options, then Elves and Drow. Humans, Half Elves, and Halflings have fewer still, and Gith have the most limited palette. But every time you select a different fantasy Race the limited palette will reset and reorient. Like a rubix cube or something lol. The color names are also rather unconventional. An example of reinventing the wheel, or muddied waters, where standard language would serve better. Notice how mixed up the metaphors are. I mean except for the top 3 rows, where temperature language is used (Warm = more redshifted, Cool= more blue-shifted, with Neutral=base) the others just skip around. Here are our BG3 Hues as listed in descending order when the palette is fully expanded.

Tones 1-10

Neutral
Cool
Warm
Blush
Pallid
Ice
Lichen
Dusk
Ash
Wisteria
Amethyst
Earth 8
Gold 8
Ochre 8
Olive 8
Sage 8
Moon back to 10
Wood
Vampire

Tones 1-8

Smoke
Sulfur
Chili
Red
Pink
Orchid
Purple
Violet
Azure
Storm
Aqua
Green
Lime
Efreeti
Dryad
Madrid
Fey
Decay

And then it's like 'OK, cool names I guess' like wandering the cosmetics aisles at a department store lol, but because of the way the overall palette is organized (or rather not organized) by Hue, they come across pretty haphazard to me.

@Dez I haven't played Black Desert or Vindictus, but that sounds very much like the sort of direction I wish they'd take it. I too miss 2d portraits, but have sort of given up the ghost on that score. There was a huge back and forth convo on the old Obsidian boards, when they were debating ditching 2d portraits in favor of 3d modelling, and I tried to argue the merits of traditional portraits for like a year and a half there. Alas, they had made up their minds already.

The basic point was always that a Portrait has to do something rather more than an Avatar, by including things like gesture and expression, lighting or contrast as a mood setter and the like. Things which give a visual sense of character on the quick read, whereas the 3d avatar was clearly like a blank face unanimated template. But many people just couldn't see the advantage, or what made a traditional portrait qualitatively different than what they were offering as a ready replacement. I'd say stuff like 'we're not there yet, Maya isn't far enough along, different levels of abstraction/immersion are required, we're giving up more than we're getting, these aren't portraits etc. And people would reply like 'who cares, I don't want a portrait, I just want the little head box to look exactly like the Avatar I created in the char creator. Fast forward almost 20 years, and we're now almost at the point where the avatar actually can function like a portrait. Games have become so cinematic, and the need for expression there is so pressing, that we can see where the games are now able to produce something passing fair for a portrait in-game. It's just that we aren't given access to the full range of gesture or expression, or the same kind of scene setting tools that the animators and directors are using. Like if I could make my Dwarf raise one eyebrow and smirk for a comic angle, do uplighting to make it seem horror, change a pose or a background and save out the cap, then it's on.

But they're still gatekeeping that stuff. They got it in a little lockbox on the director's desk where we can't reach, and the portrait/char sheet image is still just keying off the avatar with no intermediate input to give it extra character. You can see also where it's just been baked-in to some character models, like for their heads. How a Minthara or some random gobbo or tief might have a great grimace, whereas some other head is smiley, and another is stone faced. But you can't do any interchange. The modelers like abdelfatah know what they're doing, they're creating 3d portraits more or less, but we don't get that necessarily in our custom PC options. Or if they are there, they're few and far between and locked onto just one head model instead of being available across the board.

I agree completely regarding the hair and the eyes and such. I'm also reasonably happy with the skin tones on offer. They're sufficient for my needs to be honest. I mainly wanted to put that palette next to the others just to show how steep the dropoff was when we move down to the next categories.

We go from 324 colors in the skin tones, down to just 111 for the hair. The hair models themselves often kick off pretty flat, so going from one style to another and it's like the same swatch definitely isn't doing double duty in many instances, and we have only a 3rd there compared to the skin. Even if hair or dyed hair, should probably offer a lot more variety than skin, just going off what's available in reality hehe.

For the Eyes it looks like a palette of 82 there at first glance, but that's not really the case. Cause like you mentioned some of those are for Demon Eyes, or where the sclera flips, or where the inner and outer iris is inverted, or whatever else, and some colors are just walled off like that. So it's really more like half what we're seeing.

Tattoos I can understand for a limited palette, cause there are only so many ink tones that are going to work there for a universal, but the makeup I can't figure at all. I mean I don't wear makeup in my day to day life, but a cursory glance at my girlfriend's vanity and it's like even working with a single base skintone a palette of 24 is barely covering it at all lol. She has like half a dozen of those, and only what, like maybe 2 or 3 skintones to work with? Depending on the season, like a sunburn or a tan on occasion, but basically just 1 tone at bedrock. Imagine a professional makeup artist showing up to the job with a single palette for all comers? That'd never fly in Hollywood. And here we have 324 skin tones at the foundation heheh. I mean if anything the makeup palette should probably be even larger than the skin tones palette, but at least on par. I might not have a use for it, but you can be damn sure Faerun Sephora would be an instant hit with a lot of players.

Anyhow, it's pretty hard to know what their endgame is for this stuff. It could be that were are working with the barest of bones in EA and they're going to blow all our minds when the full release releases. But just in case they're thinking "neah, this is more than enough" they get a thread like this to give them pause. I mean it's really their own fault, cause I'd probably rather play the game with a full party of 6 and some WASD movement or an orbital cam etc, but since they're kicking the can on that, instead I'll just harp endlessly on the morphology and lack of char creation material till they wise up on that count hehehe

ps. to the post below - definitely!


pps. Just cause I was bored, here is the skin tone palette broken down by named group in the same order as in-game but without the diagonal sweep effect. I just crudely did a pull and paste on a black background to reassemble it, but shows how the hue jumps around, and which swatch groups are 10 deep vs 8. Also desaturated alongside to show the value skipping. Perhaps not as striking or visually tetris'y as the makeup box version we get in game with the 12 rows, but shows what's there in a different way.