Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Let's make Minthara Great Again

I don't know, I think she's being judged by an almost impossibly high standard of beauty in that case. I'd point again to the base Minthara head model shown in 3/4 profile, with the Shadowheart style braid.



There are only really a few things here that are differentiating Minthara from a straight up super-model face.

1. The bridge of her nose has been broken, so it has that mid ridge bulge, kinda sensible given her character type and fairly minor as far as broken noses go. You can barely even see it in the angle above.

2. Her orbicularis oris (where the various muscles of the cheeks connect to the lips) is slightly puffed up, giving her a permanent sourpuss or pissed off pouting expression or half smirk depending how you want to read it.

3. Her brow is furrowed, giving her the mark of Cain, or the Tau shaped indentation on her brow between the eyebrows, which we typically associated with someone who is constantly angry and scowling or racked with guilt. This is played up by having her eyebrows squared off and overplucked on the inside edges, which further emphasizes the furrowing.

4. the mental protuberance of her chin protrudes slightly and is just a bit more rounded than average. I think to make an elf face, or a half elf from a human scan, they just carve in the jawline and then add the ear models. Giving the elves a more severe jawline, though not necessarily a different cheek bone structure. All the head models kind of do the same thing there, so there's probably a mesh or something they can play with to emphasize or add some stuff that couldn't actually be there in the scan hehe.

Remove those minor accent and expression features that were probably played up in the scan and in the shading, and her basic head is essentially that of a Covergirl. I'd guess she is maybe one of the more classically attractive women in the Larian offices, and they probably just directed her to do a really thin-lip'd expression when they scanned her head initially lol. For me it completely works, given the character.

I think Tiefs have taken over from the Elves, as the default Manga looking D&D race now. The D&D race that has the more alien and otherworldly facial features, the very long ears and glowing eyes, that one might associate with traditional Elves as depicted by artists from Japan or South Korea or China. It's possible they might change course on it, but I think the Wizards art direction has settled on Elves as looking more or less like Humans, just with somewhat pointed ears and slightly sharper jaw lines, so I wouldn't expect much more on that front these days. Though they have changed this before many times so who knows.

Here's a Tiefling from Li Xiao Feng I almost posted earlier, as a counterpoint to the Drow Druid idea. Since we also haven't really seen many examples of Tiefling druids or rangers. This one gave off a bit of an underdark vibe to me as well.


The Viconia portrait from BG2, while it was certainly one of the best portraits in that game, was still pretty poorly drawn by objective standards. All the BG2 portraits were like photoshop'd paintovers from photographs I'd think and there are lots of minor issues carrying over from where the artists decided to change certain proportions. In such cases it is fruitful to flip the image as if looking at it in a mirror, where it becomes much easier to see where the symmetry problems are. Her diadem for example is off center, and her left eye, left nostril, and the whole left side of her face has a somewhat different curvature going on than the right. Her lips are slightly off alignment too relative to the rest of the facial features. The sweep of her hair and the cowl of her hood is correcting for some of this, but there's still some wonk going on there. I suspect the face was made more narrow than the original reference, which is why her eyes seem to be sitting on different planes and at different angles, in addition to one eye being much more almond shaped than the other. If you cover one side of her face with your thumb (either side, doesn't matter) you can see that it's almost like two different faces. If you squint it looks fine.



Viconia's BG2 portrait still looks much better than the Jaheira or Aerie portraits in BG2, which both have way more issues going on. But again, I'm kinda picky hehe. I think many people who prefer a more manga look for elves, might actually prefer the BG2 Jaheira or Aerie portraits, simply because they look more otherworldly. Or perhaps it's a preference for the Zelda look over the Galadriel look when it comes to elves? But I tend to just see the anatomical issues. I think its simpler to draw a more alien looking elf face than it is to draw a convincing human face, since strange proportions can then be excused as a mark of style. But asymmetries stand out to me regardless, whatever elven look one might like best hehe.

ps. Its probably kinda unfair to single out Viconia there, since the images were meant to display at a very small size.



I believe they were even smaller still, and BG would upscale them for the final display too, so with enough lost detail via scaling what I mentioned before doesn't really matter and the image totally carries. These days, with the wider monitors and everyone running at higher resolutions, the large size image wouldn't cut it for me. Although I bet if it was painted in a traditional medium, even at a very small scale on canvas, that Viconia painting I posted above would probably go to auction at like a million dollars, just from the cultural resonance alone hehe. So what do I know. At the time it was meant as what, like 60 pixels on the longest size? 8 bit bmp lol. I mean they got the job done for what they were asked to do, but these days and for Minthara I'd want more.