Thread by @Iron_Stylus

I'll fucking bite. A thread about making female characters in games.

This idiot/grifter/probably-feigning-outrage-doughboy really doesn't seem to get it, even apparently *as* a developer.

TLDR: making the nuances of a gentler face can be a real tough one in game art.

Lighting messes a lot with any geometry in games. ESPECIALLY when 3D scanning is involved. A scan will snag virtually any detail, and that detail is translated into depth, texture, volumes, etc which of course cast shadow. More severe angles will create harsher shadows.

This is why many artists don't go off of scans, and when they do, there's a lot of post-scan editing, even for celebrities who may have been sampled, because you have to alter the shape and form to smooth out specific aspects. Even Johnny here isn't a 1:1 of Keanu.

The modeller, if they're going off of the scan, will have to tweak and push and pull to make sure certain bits don't catch shadows and light because that might be more "appealing. So The model here has been smoothed in certain areas, and sharpened in others.

I mean come on. Keanu isn't *this smooth*. Sure, maybe some of that is to idealize him, but IDEALIZE KEANU? No it's to make sure the lighting doesn't catch every crevice. Ultimately the "flatter" a texture is, like sans normals/bump maps the better the lighting will affect it.

One of the complications with trying to go for such realism is that it gives the eye TOO much information, so much so that it feels off to us, because our eye selectively grabs the important stuff, but disregards certain smaller details. We don't see this much info.

Even the legendary Marcin Blaszczak edited the source scan. But he modeled the body, no scan there, and since that's stylized he had to make the head similarly slightly stylized.

And that's a male model, like dudes are complaining about resembles the actor more, and yeah, that's because there's been selective edits, and often the character will look MORE like the actor. Like in this figure which would have to be edited to make a physical product

It looks like that they even "corrected" some of the asymmetry in Keanu's face, such as his eye level from both sides.

These things are incredibly subtle, but it's what artists will do, mostly for production reasons such as mirroring textures on the model itself.

There's a point in that dipshit's original post, in that men don't seem to be as "edited" as a female source. That's a whole fucking culture thing on top of production. We forgive men for having structure in their faces (chiseled, sharp) and we gasp when women have a wrinkle.

Case in point when I worked on the Fiora rework. There was s h i t f i t had by gamers when we gave her a unique face, one that was stylized, but one that showed structure. So much of a shitfit that we caved to the demands. I did this paintover to make her more "pretty".

I was pissed about this (and to be transparent the splash team didn't want to make the changes) because there was suuuuch a small difference in the changes but here we were. Defending simply chiseling a woman's face WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE SEVERE LOOKING.

Severe looking:

Going back to the execution, I also did Fiora's high rez sculpt and I did a TON of smoothing that you just wouldn't do on a dude because (((reasons))). Not all were somehow misogynistic, but it's the accepted stylistic treatment to reduce features of women.

With league we were of course not working with in-game lighting, all texture was baked in. No normals or anything, no shadows other than what we painted. This was by necessity, but even with baked in lighting women get reduced ultimately to pretty much a flat color face.

For a game that DID use lighting for a LOT of heavy lifting, like Spellbreak, Damon (my AD on the project) and Carter (3D artist n the team) had to do a ton of tweaking to the model itself to not catch shadows created by the lighting. It was sorcery.

In this case entire chunks of faces and anatomy were alpha-d out in order to.. yeah.. not make noses have shape. Now this was a CHOICE as we were pulling a lot from Guilty Gear, but it goes to show how much you have to mess with a model to not catch light.

Going back to hyper realistic models though, ESPECIALLY the scanned models, yeah, you have everything from tons of sculpted detail, maybe not tweaked by the artist, all sorts of maps on the model (spec, roughness, blah blah) crazy shaders for subsurface scattering, etc

(also that last image is badass)

So there are so many things to tweak and make balanced. Imagine having like 100 parameters as to how the character will express JUST in a few frames or in a real-time environment which could cause all sorts of weirdness.

So yeah, I can near guarantee you this "translation issue" has MUCH more to do with all those parameters affecting the model in the specific context of this shot to make it look a bit different from the source actor. But also like.. ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CONTEXT HERE.

My *actual* critiques of this stuff is that scanned models are overleveraged so hard, and take so much information that the eye normally just throws away, that it's all uncanny valley to me. Even the "best case" the characters still creep me the fuck out.

Because I am a trans lesbian in all of my RPG journeys Judy changed my life in Cyberpunk and there was no source actor there. Just an amazing expression of the artist's vision and she feels *more* real than virtually any other NPC i've ever met, or even main character.

But there's artistry here. There's the "technican's touch" which bleeds through here. Panam, Misty, Jackie, are all from-scratch characters and they are so incredibly deep and meaningful to the experience.

So to me this this whole discourse has nothing really to do with how the character ended up, it's the entire thing about how shitty scanned actors can feel because they incorporate all this data our brain actually hates seeing.

Like all of this is yuck to me.

In the case of SOME of these, there is SUCH a huge investment in recreation they ALMOST get away with it. But like.. jesus encountering LITERAL Idris Elba in CP is kinda jarring. All the other NPCs are hand crafted and then this dude from the real world is just like "hi"

I can't even imagine the sheer amount of crap the artists had to deal with to recreate him with all his bells and whistles, but something in my brain still screams when I'm talking to him but it's all a symphony when talking to Judy.

And back to women, they are given a raw deal because gamers lose their shit when it's really the actors just NOT WEARING MAKEUP in the game shots versus film/tv contexts. Like dudes.. I guess you just don't even know enough women to know makeup sculpts the face.

This character STILL HAS makeup but it's just a different style and MY DUDES please dip into a sephora to understand that makeup, in it's rawest sense, affects how light interacts with skin through chemical/color/material parameters.

And back to the raw deal women get, we apparently only judge them "beautiful" if they're a terrifyingly reductive version of themselves devoid of any facial features, pigmentation, even like.. blood. Everything is sanded down and it's fucking gross.

Like sure, get off on whatever you get off on, but maybe "gritty space war bounty hunter tale" is not the format for you to jerk off to. Perhaps that's a more gritty context where you want to have people like real. Like our bug killing mother.

I mean jesus even when Sigourney is ported into a game she looks creepy as fuck.

Also side note on making women for games, these are some HIGHLY talented folks in the industry (red being someone I worked with at Riot) and they speak to how subtle the effort must be to capture a softer form. Hopefully they don't get mad at me posting their thoughts!

Even the most complex styles, they have nuance and subtle efforts which make even a harsher execution palatable. Did anyone REALLY call the characters in Arcane ugly? Vi sure has an "unconventional" face for gamers, Jinx always looked like a heroin addict.

Like you can have technical feedback and ick when something looks overproduced, over sampled, over sourced, blah blah because those are legitimate bits of "harm" that game parameters cause to hyper-real executions. The answer is to let artists art.

Ultimately the whole conversation is dumb, dumb because mark kern doesn't actually know how to make a functional art pipeline/product and even if he does, he has shit tastes anyway. Also dumb because we have double standards for women in games. Always have.

So once again, mark and his dipshit suckers can fuck off, because anyone actually making games is making the best thing they can, with the resources they can, and I'd love to see a gamer/grifter even try to make something functional and tasteful.

and unless your game takes place entirely in marmoset or statically just standing there inside of unreal with some sort of (probably not optimized) shader or other rendering, this aint it either. Also, yawn. This stuff is so 2013

Good night folks