I think Nikhil is moonlighting as a russian psyops troll. If not, you ought to because at this point it's like a part time job.
Whole comment has nothing to do with the thread.
Not trolling, I meant that it becomes harder to sculpt female characters because of the additional emphasis on conveying a personality that has the desired appeal.
Again not the situation in every case but I do feel that the Kay Vess situation was a great example of how design and sculpting prowess don't always mesh well together when it comes to creating appealing characters.
It also makes one question if the base for a realistic character ought to be a scan, since in this particular case, using Humberly Gonzalez as a base while being aware about the reception of any alterations to her face, would have made for an easier sculpt.
I think one elaboration of the topic would be "Is it harder to sculpt women than sculpting men for the purpose of creating a character for a video game product designed for mass appeal."
Going from the article, it seems like they didn't want to take the risk of diverting attention from the chracter story by risking uncanny valley issues if they considered more realism? The comments seem to disagree.
Considering the circumstances I think I should player the older Dragon Age Games first. I did write to the game director to use the game to provide more visibility to foundations like the Ali Fourney center since the game supports and promotes LGBTQ people through its story and content. Maybe they will add this in a DLC.
I think that what makes sculpting a person more or less difficult generally has to do with the goals of the sculptor.
For instance, let's consider sculpting a game character with simple hero anatomy in an A pose with stylization. That approach is going to be basically the same for male and female characters, in my opinion. IMO the female characters might have a little more subtlety to the forms, whereas people generally like to see highly defined musculature with the male charactes. This essentially means you have hundreds of anatomical landmarks to work off of on a male character, as opposed to maybe 50-60 in between subtle form changes with the female character. For some people, the former is more difficult, for others, the latter. The catch is that a lot of game artists take this way too far and the male characters end up looking like a conglomerate of pieces of bubble wrap of varying sizes while the female characters look like they're made out of noodles. So, y'know, there are checks and balances even in this anatomical use case. The point is that due to the nature of an A pose and game art, neither is really more challenging than the other, but they are different enough so that you may find yourself gravitating towards one or the other in your personal work.
That being said, if you want to take a more fine arts approach and you're sculpting nude models in complex poses, then I would say that the difficulty actually evens out between male and female and the challenge becomes more than a technicality, but rather a test of artistic insight for capturing emotion. For instance, is it more difficult to sculpt a woman in a dynamic pose that captures a feeling of the sublime than a male? No, probably not. That's because capturing the feeling of the sublime is insanely difficult in both instances.
Replies
Again not the situation in every case but I do feel that the Kay Vess situation was a great example of how design and sculpting prowess don't always mesh well together when it comes to creating appealing characters.
It also makes one question if the base for a realistic character ought to be a scan, since in this particular case, using Humberly Gonzalez as a base while being aware about the reception of any alterations to her face, would have made for an easier sculpt.
I think one elaboration of the topic would be
"Is it harder to sculpt women than sculpting men for the purpose of creating a character for a video game product designed for mass appeal."
I was at EA during its development, but didn't get a first hand look at the design process.
Here's a write up from Bioware,
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/bioware-explains-why-dragon-age-the-veilguards-visuals-arent-a-diversion-from-the-rpg-series-first-3-games-but-rather-a-culmination-of-their-unique-art-styles/
Going from the article, it seems like they didn't want to take the risk of diverting attention from the chracter story by risking uncanny valley issues if they considered more realism?
The comments seem to disagree.
Considering the circumstances I think I should player the older Dragon Age Games first.
I did write to the game director to use the game to provide more visibility to foundations like the Ali Fourney center since the game supports and promotes LGBTQ people through its story and content.
Maybe they will add this in a DLC.
For instance, let's consider sculpting a game character with simple hero anatomy in an A pose with stylization. That approach is going to be basically the same for male and female characters, in my opinion. IMO the female characters might have a little more subtlety to the forms, whereas people generally like to see highly defined musculature with the male charactes. This essentially means you have hundreds of anatomical landmarks to work off of on a male character, as opposed to maybe 50-60 in between subtle form changes with the female character. For some people, the former is more difficult, for others, the latter. The catch is that a lot of game artists take this way too far and the male characters end up looking like a conglomerate of pieces of bubble wrap of varying sizes while the female characters look like they're made out of noodles. So, y'know, there are checks and balances even in this anatomical use case. The point is that due to the nature of an A pose and game art, neither is really more challenging than the other, but they are different enough so that you may find yourself gravitating towards one or the other in your personal work.
That being said, if you want to take a more fine arts approach and you're sculpting nude models in complex poses, then I would say that the difficulty actually evens out between male and female and the challenge becomes more than a technicality, but rather a test of artistic insight for capturing emotion. For instance, is it more difficult to sculpt a woman in a dynamic pose that captures a feeling of the sublime than a male? No, probably not. That's because capturing the feeling of the sublime is insanely difficult in both instances.