Thread by @delaneykingrox

Hello, I am a character artist with over 20 years experience and several game of the years under her belt.

If someone says "we didn't add girls because it costs too much" punch them in the head with their own asshole, because it actually doesn't.

The biggest cost is voice acting and dialogue entry for two cases- if your game has a lot of npc interactions and you use two pronouns.

Lets break down the art side to show you why this is a myth.

First, the largest amount of time these days is spent detailing the high res sculpts.

Packs, belts, armour, gloves, boots and so forth.

Guess what? We don't start from scratch. We reuse those packs and boots and belts.

Hell, we also reuse heads and bodies. It takes very little time to adjust these to a new model.

Once we set up high res models, we include material selections by baking that data into something called a clown map (id mask). This lets our painting programs know where to apply which material.

So retexturing a female variant of a male model isn't days of work anymore, it can be minutes or hours, depending on how smart you set it up.

The proportions of a typical cisgender exaggerated female model and a cisgender male exaggerated game model can be stored in two blend shapes on a simple cage mesh.

Skin wrapping models to these and then blending the original shape morphs the geo into the new proportions

In other words, we stick the clothes and gear to one model and morph it into the other... which gets you 90 percent of the way there.

Animation has changed a lot in the last decade. You don't have to author every single animation as there are many ways to quickly retarget entire animation sets from one rig to another.

Unreal, for example, lets you macro over a whole set to a COMPLETELY different rig in about fifteen minutes if you know what you are doing.

You can then adjust the ones that look wrong.

But of course, you would not use a completely different rig as women and men are... get this... the same species.

If you count carefully, it is spooky how we have the same number of joints, fingers, eyes... weird huh?

Unity and Unreal both have dynamic, run time rigging now. This means we can have one skeleton with animations drive another skeleton and have it behave differently based on rules we set in code.

So even of women had extra legs with tentacles for feet, we could still have them driven from the male animations.

Strangely, we don't. Which makes things easier, I guess.

Okay, so adapting high res models doen't cost much.

Rebaking textures doesn't cost much.

Adapting animations doesn't.

Hmmm, what else?

Welp, boobs. Yunno, anyone who owns boobs will tell you bouncing your boobs is painful. We strap those humps, those humps those lovely lady lumps down for a reason.
Jiggle can be done with dynamic bones if you have to do it.
P.s if they bounce more than twice, they are wrong

Retopologising and uv mapping is probably the longest task.

However if you know your tools, that takes way less time these days.

Technologies such as Zbrush zremesh, blender voxel remeshing, max quadrify ontop of tools like topogun speed this up hugely.

Blender, Modo, Maya and Max all have varying degrees of excellence in retopo and uv unmapping tools straight off the bat. None absolutely suck at it these days.

So tracing back, we have much, much faster authoring tools. We reuse and adapt assets. We work smart setting up deform cage meshes and blend shapes. We have many options for animation retargeting, dynamics, run time rigging and... oh look, lots of animation packs online!

What is this sorcery? I can buy ready made meshes and animations on the internet?

But what if I don't wanna use the exact same models as everyone else?

Welp, dipshit, they come in fbx format. You know what opens fbx format?

LITERALLY FUCKING EVERYTHING

Yes, you can customise content you buy online, rebake it, retarget it to your rigs...

I mean, it's almost like you so misogynistic you aren't even looking at the available options

And when you say "cost" you know there is another factor here? Maximising your market to increase revenue.

In simple terms...

Spend 10 bucks to make 1000
Spend 20 bucks to make 2000

Which is better?

Well, option 1 you have 990 profit
Option 2 gives you 1980.

*slow claps*

You know the market share women have in games? You should. It's your business.

So to wrap up,

A) it isn't a huge expensive to add women.

B) it more than doubles your market.

C) you are the problem.

Oh, and my work includes in-game and cinematic characters for...

Unreal Tournament 2004
Dragonage Origins
God of War: Chains of Olympus
Lord of The Rings Online
Dungeons and Dragons Online
Civilziation IV
Mythos
Fury
Bigworld Tech Demos
Salvation Prophecy

And many more

And I have been a tech artist, and modeling consultant for Autodesk, Foundry, Turbosquid and Discreet.

I was a demo artist for 3dsmax, maya, modo, mudbox and claytools.

I built demo characters for autodesk.

And I have boobs.

Yay.

If you enjoyed this, you can support my shitposting here...

ko-fi.com/dellak

And patreon.com/darkling
(I don't get to update patreon rewards much last year, but they are in the works for this year)

One last thing.

You know how much money straight/bisexual men spend on looking at women?

Funnily enough NBs and women also often like looking at women too.

ADD THEM TO YOUR GAMES

and after you have finished putting playable women in your games and are wondering what to do next...

*points at non binary people*

And let me remind you that Paul Steed (model, rig, animation) and Kenneth Scott (textures and uvs) put lots of playable female characters, all with different rigs and animation sets back in QUAKE III ARENA.

Bitch.

And that was back in the days when we had 3dsmax 3 and fuck all else. Those rigs anims where authored by hand.

Imagine what you could do with modern tools?

*points to ART animation rigging tools for Maya from epic games on their asset store*

Hell, I skinned all the women in Unreal Tournament 2004 in a day.

I used the hidden gem "skin tools" in the 3dsmax tools menu to bake weights into a mesh, then fitted that new mesh over the other girls and boom... baked across.

A few fixes and I went to get me some beer.

THAT WAS 16 YEARS AGO

Even blender, which costs a whopping ZERO bucks (but you should donate to support it) is lightyears better than the tools we had then.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Put playable women and NBs in your games.

Help support my need to eat between rants.
ko-fi.com/dellak

P.s writers in my experience have zero issue planning dialogue so it avoids or minimises pronouns if you give them fore warning. This can reduce your costs.

I can think of one game that would be expensive to retroactively add a female player character to, and that would be Hitman, because the costume change system is part of the puzzles.

So to go back and make it work for the campaigns would be extremely hard.

But the art? Trivial.

Adding female doom marine Crash as a playable character for Doom?
Easy peasy.
Some NPC dialogue needs rerecording, you will need some femake grunts, but the rest wouldn't be hard at all. I mean, it's power armour.

*female.

Excuse the typos, I am sick. Also lazy.

And going forward? Many games can plan this into their productions.

Planning ahead saves money folks.

Okay now some practical links for new artists:

ART is available for free now on the unreal Asset Store.

Real time rigging in unreal

IK rig technology... an oldie but a greaty

Retargeting completely different rigs in unreal and baking our those juicy, juicy anims without breaking a sweat

Run time rigging in unity (its in the package manager)

Retargeting Mixamo rigs in unity

Skin wrap in 3dsmax. I use this a lot in conjunction with the skin tool hidden in the tools rollout.

And another example of skinwrap.

Using cloth brushes to speed up clothing changes.

Using ID maps in texturing for material assignment

Example of an id map
bnc.lt/a/key_live_eif…

Ultimately, not including women in your games and citing cost speaks volumes about how much you value women.

You don't deserve the women in your life.

Here is a thread of mine to help you budgeting the art for your indy game.

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1159641973873004545?s=19

Phew, that was some thirsty work. Mainly because my thirst for Anna Kendrick. Anyhoo, I love coffee. Wanna buy me some?
ko-fi.com/dellak

Unbreaking thread

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1214372232178233344?s=19

Oh but retargeting animations doesn't look righ.... aaaaaactually there have been studies into this. Here is one.

researchgate.net/figure/fig2_23…

Game dev isn't free. It costs money to add anything because the team require paying for their labor.

However to say that adding women is this ridiculous overhead is just a blatant lie, or based on vastly outdated knowledge of modern asset creation techniques.

But no, you don't double the budget. It doesn't even double the art budget for playable characters. No, it doesn't require huge amounts of code. No, it doesn't require everything to be reanimated anymore. No, it doesn't require work to be redone. No it doesn't. No. No. No.

Tools list for art students reading this.

A.R.T is a maya plugin by epic. Available from the unity store. It create rigs, proxy models for in game testing and animation pose capture. Needs full maya not LT.

Substance painter: my go to for baking and texturing using smart mats

Substance painter lets you bake data like AO, world direction, thickness, material ID and edge detection, then use these to dynamically generate things like wear, dust, dirt etc using "smart materials".

You cap pick up a limited version of Substance Painter on Steam right now.

Zbrush: An industry staple, bastard hard to learn because the UX is a nightmare but super, super powerful. Has excellent automatic zremeshing for topology, allows you to reuse and blend premade parts

Topogun: a staple tool used for retopologising for many years now.

Blender: several retopo plug in tools available to help speed this up. Check the Blender Store.

Modo: mainly used as a modeling package in games, it's a great tool. The newer ID software games use it a lot.

Modo has a one click tab for retopo that sets up the snapping and viewport, which makes for a nice experience.

Maya LT: has EXCELLENT Uvmapping tools. I always deop back to unwrapping in this as I can do whole characters very quickly. Highlights include "get and set density"

Which quickly ensures all your UV islands use the same texel density.

Mixamo: you will find a lot of models and anims here that you can grab in fbx format.

Unity store: even if you are not using unity, the asset store has lots of FBX you can convert to use in your projects.

MocapX capture for facial capture on your iphone / maya. Just use a car phone holder to put it next to your monitor and you can capture pretty good facial stuff.

Unreal. Even if you are not using unreal (its awesome), the program lets you retarget animations quickly and effectively, apply animation layering and get out FBXs. LOTS of tutorials available.

Autodesk Mudbox: nowhere near as powerful as zbrush, but what is excellent is the ability to create, tune and layer non barycentric morphs (blend shapes) so a killer app for doing things like facial expression wrinkles and tension mapping for animated clothing wrinkles.

If you are just starting out, Blender 2.8+ is free and a great place to start.
It has zbrush like sculpting, modeling, rigging and animation all in one package.

It features quick rigs, a since 2.8, a clean and organised modern interface.

Good place to start as the cost is zero.

For your first engine as an artist I would grab Unreal. Again, it is free.
It is a solid toolset and has all the bells and whistles you will find in most custom studio engines you will go onto work with.
Unity3d is a bit of shambles at this moment for beginners.

But hopefully it will fix that in the coming years.

My recommendation is mastering Zbrush too. It is a fixed price, but you never need to pay after that for later versions, tutes, plugins etc. It's bastard hard to learn, but a must have.

Hope that all helps.

Remember, game art is a technical career and is constantly in motion- tools and workflows change.

Keep sharp, keep exploring, keep learning.

And the more technical you become, the faster and more freer you are to be an artist.