Bonus scene! For all those hungry vampires out there!

Astarion's Bite-Night sequence is pretty darn clunky for smaller characters right now, and if we add in the theoretical possibility of our character getting vamped at some point, then there are some things I'd like to flag for consideration as well! The basic positioning that we're using for the bite scene might look something like this (right now it doesn't look like anything, and before that we had arms going into bodies and other nonsense):



The top hand, both in the original game scene and here, is used primarily to position the victim's shoulder and help expose the neck, while the lower hand is used for support. Moving the shoulder is important here, since we need to make room to get our fangs into the neck properly, after all.

If the bite victim is smaller, however, a direct translation of this position needs certain adjustments:



With a smaller target, lower to the ground, and a more delicate shoulder, the natural inclination to comfortably shift the shoulder is more likely to be with the arm down and in, rather than up and out to the side – this is also best since the raise side-out arm would risk obscuring the smaller character from some shots. The biter will also need to lean down and turn their head downward at a steeper angle. Their support arm is more likely to edge further forward and around, to compensate for the slightly different centre of balance as they lean over the smaller target.

Hilariously (not really, it's sad...), the current halfling models, with their ridiculous over-sized bobble-heads, heads larger than the heads of medium-sized creatures, actually make Astarion's bite impossible to achieve! He can't darn well get at our necks to bite them, because our ballooning heads are in the way. In the game scenes, this was ignored, and it just clips really badly. Funnily enough, fixing the halfling models as I suggested in the main halfling model thread would remove this problem!

If, in the future, we can contract this curse for ourselves, repeating the bite scene with a smaller biter needs adjustments of its own:


Just as biting a smaller, lower down creature changes the arm position in one direction, so biting a larger creature changes it the other way – here, the angle at which the smaller biter reaches to shift the shoulder necessitates a more raised arm and a turned grip, pulling that shoulder down and away so they can get access. As above, the smaller biter's support arm is more likely to shift back in the opposite direction, to be back behind the victim's head, rather than to the side or in front.

These are only small adjustments, but not insignificant – if you don't make them, then the smaller sized characters will clip badly, and no-one wants that. You'll get blood everywhere.

==

Okay, now we're done! Those of you who made it this far, I commend you! A final thanks to all our participating fictional character models:


That's a lot of simulated pixel intimacy... Am I too invested in this?

Last edited by Dom_Larian; 14/01/22 08:52 PM.