SOTA Female character, the softer feminine side & more

Because the men here are thinking about:

1) Boobs 76% of the time
2) Beer 23% of the time
3) Other unimportant stuff 1% of the time

 

Boobs are the first thing noticed on those games because they are over-(hyped)inflated to begin with, thus drawing attention right away.

Not to mention the way she is framed: Mid waist into large breasts, face far enough back as to keep focus on the boob area first.

They are playing into the messages out here in RL, it is no surprise they emphasize that and its the first thing we see.

I also have issue with the way they all stand, with perfectly arched in spines, as if everyone actually stands upright with their chest pushed out.

I understand these are meant to be fantasy, so take it all with two heaping lumps of salt.

I feel the sad fact is, image problems won't go away anytime soon, and if someone had the other b word to actually make more "real" looking characters they would get tons of feedback on how ugly everyone looks, even though it would be close to reality.

No one wants reality (Celebs made up and not made up)

AT ALL (27 Photos That Demonstrate The Power Of Makeup)

 

Actually, its just as unrealistic that the typical male MMO character is buffed up with big broad shoulders. With big shouldered armor typically enhancing that too. They typically show less skin though, which is the main difference.

 

It takes serious skill to take amazing concept art and put it into model form AND rig it.

Also, Issac no longer works for Port. he is @ Certain Affinity.

 

She will never get those pants off if they get wet.

 

Hi Guys well it was a great Dev hangout, lots of interesting stuff, but of course no mention AS USUAL in regards to questions regarding the fate of the female avatars. My questions continue to go unanswered. It is "What, if anything is going to be done with the female avatar"? If the answer is nothing, just polish, then why not say that and perhaps give a reason? **cheers everyone**

 

I feel your pain. None of my questions were answered either. I tried asking my questions via email a couple of months ago but didn't get a solid answer. Its a bit frustrating.

 

Just a hint: Look what Developer Qball is doing and what threads Qball does look at.

Also if you read the last Stand Up's you will find hints that they are listening.

 

Oh really I will check it out. And here I was feeling a bit blue my friend.

 

SO I have been writing up a reply for this and at this point it is really long. This thing i am working on is not a list of excuses or a angry at the forum rant, but more of where we are the direction we are going. It a short version of game development. Maybe i am an in the minority here, but i would think you guys would like to know.

I would like to know if any of you are even interested in the whole answer or just a short answer.

Thanks let me know,

Qball

 

Be a shame to waste all that work by not letting us read the whole thing.

 

I didn't originally participate in this thread, but I'm always interested in knowing the "why's" of development. Often times, as a fan and a player, I don't know why you guys do a lot of things. I understand that you probably have solid reasons for "why" but you rarely share those reasons. This often leaves a gap between players and developers, but it also leaves a barrier that is sometimes helpful because it allows developers to not be second guessed.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I would love to know why you guys do everything, but you should understand that the moment you tell us you're leaving yourself open to being second guessed by the masses. If you're ok with that, I say give us the long version. If you're not ok with that, I'd say give us the short and sweet version.

Because most fans and players don't want to pick fights with developers or even second guess them, we just want the best game we can possibly get.

P.S. I think the character models are fine.

 

Hi Qball, oh yes please the long answer. I am such a strong supporter of this game. Truthfully I am not going anywhere, it's just that I am not understanding why this question isn't answered over and over. Are there choices or differences that can be made regarding our characters as for me mainly the female since I play one and am one? Thank you, thank you for taking your time to comment. I do just want to know outright and excuses are alright too. Character look is important to many gamers, we spend , in many cases, way too much time looking at that character, and having an unattractive one lessens the experience for some. I have played unattractive characters and of course the experience was sometimes great, but just to know the answer in this case would be so lovely and our guys are kinda clunky especially the female running, yikes. Thanks again and I appreciate the hard work everyone is doing. It is amamzing to see.

 

Baron Drocis, thank you for your comments and feedback on the thread. While I appreciate the well written comments you always make, and the thought that must go into them, no the models are not fine. Something is wrong with them, and of course some parts could be the pre-alpha but to know would be great. I would love to hear about the development also. I too find it so very interesting, and as always I am a huge fan of SOTA and also want what is the very best for our game.

 

Ok I will post it then. It's going to have to be in parts and on its own page. Though I will put the first part here with a link to the page.

I have heard all the horror stories about the trolls and venomous comments, so I want to let you know up front. This is about art production, specifically with the characters. I am not going to discuss game design and things people do and do not like about gameplay. If I get unproductive comments or the standard things forums can devolve into, I might just give up on writing this stuff, because as you can tell its on my own time.

Thank you for all your support, we really do appreciate it. I just want to try for once to go over the challenges we have to hopefully make you see we do this out of love.

SO coming soon here (and another place, link will be provided)

I just want to finish up the first thoughts, (and wrangle kids at home)

Qball

 

Oh thanks Qball and again for taking your time outside of work to answer. I know I mostly don't know the development side of things so I very much appreciate this, and of course am so excited to finally get to know the details of our characters development challenges and what is going on underneath what I see. That will be so great

 

Thanks Qball, it would be interesting to know where you guys are heading with the character models and why.

I don't expect amazing character models with a million customisation sliders like the big budget games, but it had been mentioned some time back (by either Starr or Chris, I think) that we would see some changes and improvements when you get Unity 5. It just sometimes feels like those improvements dropped off the radar, and we don't know if they will be coming in the future or not.

If what we have now is what we're going to end up with at release, then I'd rather know that now and get used to it than keep hoping for improvements that are never going to happen and then be disappointed later. I'm not looking to pick a fight over it, just to understand what we can reasonably expect for our characters over the next few months. Whether it's a question of budgetary constraints, style decisions, waiting for a new engine or whatever, it would just be nice to know.

(And I have to agree with Majoria, the female running animation seems a little odd - but I don't know if anything can be done about that?)

 

Qball thanks definitely interested in your posts, I have been stalking this thread because characters are really important in a visual medium. Sure some games can get away without them (Tomas was alone was about a group of blocks after all) but when the game wants you to put yourself into it reasonable customization and reasonably good looking models are important.

I LOVE Mass Effect but something which bugged me about the first one was no matter what you did you ended up looking ugly no matter how good you made the initial model look. Thankfully they fixed that in number 2

 

PART 1 - Where are...
Hi All,

I am Qball and I am the Character Lead on Shroud of the Avatar. I'm sorry I have been off the forums so long, the character "team" and I are buried up to our neck in content delivery. I want to take some time to answer some of the questions that have popped up and possibly explain the process of game development, at least with characters, a bit further. 1st I want to thank all those who have such a passion for the game characters and opinions they would like to see. Myrcello, thanks for starting this and pushing for a response, I realize you are all the dark and from time to time. I will try and jump on here from whenI can and give you all some answers.

Honestly, I avoid the forums, and tell my "team" to do the same. Don’t get me wrong, its not because we don't think your posts are valuable but more so because allot of them can be less than helpful, if not downright mean. As an artist and as the lead over an art team, the last thing we need is a comment to rip down the work we do before its done. Having an artist down or angry is bad thing for production and overall morale.

Just to give you some background on my experience and knowledge. I have worked on over a dozen games, a few tv commercials and a couple of films. I have lead teams large and small. I've even been an Art Director on several projects as well. Nine or so of the games I've worked on are considered AAA games, though I have worked on several smaller ones as well. So let’s just say that with my 15 years in the industry, I’ve been around the block a few times. The devs at Portalarium are here because of the love and passion for what we are trying to achieve. This is a revolutionary game development cycle and if we can pull it off you all get to be part of it. No one in this studio is here to make bank or exploit anyone, as I've heard other complain. We all are experienced, hardworking developers who, above anything else, want to make the best game we can with the limited resources we have. I don't think people understand that all of the dev team are taking a big risk working on a big title on a tiny budget. It’s an untested development funding type, as games are usually created like any other mass media type. Pitch, funding, budgets, deadlines, release all with a big brother watching over us ( sometimes more than one). Because of that we have had the pleasure of working with some pros for only a short period, as they move on to the certainty of a paycheck and flashy projects that larger companies can provide. My wife has one of those gigs, and it is because of that I am able to follow this dream( yes my wife works in the industry as UI lead). Ok enough of how I feel about the project and company, let’s get to the specifics of my department

Knowing that we have a small amount of funds, let me say this not a big team. It is not also not normal dev cycle by any stretch of the imagination. To start with, this project is the definition of a skeleton crew. My "team" consists of myself, another artist and… oh wait that’s it! Just the two of us. For a while we had another brilliant artist but for right now that's it, a big whopping 2. Some people put animation into the character team category but that is a whole world unto itself, and they have their own lead ( just an FYI they too number 2 ). We had a brilliant concept artist for a while and while his specialty was bringing RG's visions to life, he often made time for us with concepts. At this point though we don't have that either, and that this is a key point I will touch upon later. Resources are expensive and something we can't afford em, especially this early on. Eventually hopefully we will be able to afford staffing up, maybe after we launch and become an overnight success!

Now what does that mean in production? What would be a normal amount of character people on a project? To give you some perspective, when I was working on Guitar Hero for the Wii we had 20 artists that were generalist, 4 or 5 of them worked specifically on characters. When I was working on GH 7 (never released) for PS3/360 we had a 20+ man team just for characters (not including concept), and even that was a low ball amount. I've worked at places that outsourced character work as well. From my experience this always come back to the in house art staff reworking the stuff we get back. Even when we had a team working with the outsourced studio, it still always had hiccups. There is something about having your staff in house that keeps the direction on course. So when I discuss this team being limited, I am not blowing smoke about who is delivering the character content. Right now it’s just me and the other artist. As for content here is a list of the content above and beyond the base Character models we have to create.

The character team is responsible for creating;(I love lists)

• All the monsters (including versions elf archer, elf magician, elf fighter, etc),
• all the human npcs,
• Concepting if needed when not available
• All the animals and their variations,
• All the armor,
• All cloth dynamic work,
• All the hair and face options
• All the weapons,
• Usually skinning the characters,
• Building all the outfits in the game, including monster ones you can loot
• Skinning all the outfits to the avatars
• Skinning tweaking the hair dynamics we've recently added in
• Setting up the textures so they will work correctly with the shaders in Unity (Even the custom shaders we've made)
• I’m sure I could go on but I think you get the idea, and this doesn't even speak to the complexity each task has.
  • (on a side note I am also working with another person on the Character FX design and implementation)

This is not a list to ask for your sympathy, but more to give you real world truth about our game development, and why some things people request take time. In all actuality, this list is not much different from most games I’ve worked on, its just our compressed schedule and resources thats different. A normal Character Dev cycle, especially for the lead character of a game, can take the whole game development, up to 3 years or more. That includes pre production, which on this game, is something I was not a part of, because I came in later. This is with a completely dedicated artist going through iteration after iteration of models. In our game we have had 2 iterations on the female and 3 on the male. Each iteration only took at most 3 week of development, with the last few being closer to one week.

Next we will talk about realistic time frames for development and what is involved. I will also tell you why some of the examples posted on the forums can not be compared to in game assets.

Thanks,

Qball

Also posted here => https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...nd-content-from-the-character-art-devs.16391/