Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Elves are not Elven - Tel-quessir feed back ;)

The Aerie shown there in photoreal demonstrates why they need to dilate the pupils and englarge the iris relative to the white in order for a stylized anime elf face to carry. Otherwise having tilted orbitals/eyelids will make the face appear crosseyed.

I posted this image in feedback, but it's like 6 pages down now, meaning it may as well not exist, so I'll put it here too hehe....


Anyhow you can see the same effect there (albeit more subdued) with Male Elf head 3. Even a subtle tilt in the eyes has a pretty outsized effect on overall impression.

Basically if you change the eyeline from horizontal to oblique, such that the medial canthus of the tear duct is significantly lower down on the face than the lateral canthus, but don't enlarge the pupil/iris at the same time, it will always give off that crosseyed appearance.

In anime the eyes are typically like 3 times as large and set twice as far apart, which is how they can get away with it there. Even Princess Zelda still has a horizontal eyeline and round orbitals though. Once you tilt the ducts down it's hard to avoid the crosseyed thing unless the pupils/iris are pretty massive to offset.

I'm not the hugest fan of elves in that style, but if that's what they're after, the size/shape of the eyes definitely makes a difference in how appealing it's going to look.

ps. this is rough but just for the quick read... if the iris is enlarged and the pupil dilated the rest of the morphs around the eyes to make the orbitals more triangular aren't quite as pronounced, but it still carries. If they go with larger and wider set orbitals for half-elves they could do the iris/pupil at like 1.5 and then twice that for the full elves. For the ears they could do both length and angle, with the full elves having the longer and more oblique options. The rationale for larger pupils in the fantasy races makes sense with vision bonuses, elves and halflings and such. Trying to hit something in the middle for half-elves that favor their human ancestry in the looks. Right now I think all the current elven heads make fine half elves. For full elves enlarged eyes and more triangular skull options.

aerie iris at x2 dilated

Also this is an alt dark aerie I had saved on the old hd hehe... Shows eyes more at 1.5. Something like that I think would work well for a more dialed down option or for half elves too.