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Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 9:04 am
by Storm Munin
I suggest something be done to have the current fullbody clothing removed and something revealing the skin colour on one or more body part replacing them, at character creation.
Be it hand, shoulder or whatever.

Why?
As is in character creation you can see the face of the toon, the rest of the body are hidden beneath fullbody clothing.
Through the awesome work of our artists choices for faces have been added that does not properly reflect the skin colour the toon will have on the rest of the body due to your choice of overall complexion.
Thus even the most glaring inconsistency between the skin color of your toon's face and its body has again and again proven a nasty surprise once the server has been entered.
Be it fair or duskier of complexions.
I fail to see why time and effort should be spent creating/deleting or RCRing toons again and again due to this current awkwardness.

So, please, give us a little more flesh at character creation. ;)

/M

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 10:26 am
by Aspect of Sorrow
Granting extra skin doesn't solve the issue you described. NWN2's models for armor are very lego-esque even if there appears to be a seamless transition, the head, torso, arms, hands is actually detached. The models for gloves, torsos, heads, etc, have texturing masks that interfere with the base NWN2 skin color selection, causing the break of continuity.
I fail to see why time and effort should be spent creating/deleting or RCRing toons again and again due to this current awkwardness.
You have to understand that while aesthetics are nice, they are not on the utmost of priorities. Much of the model and texture CC has come from volunteer uploads to the vault, and as it adds to NWN2 as a whole, BGTSCC's specific module development remains as the staff's most primary objective. PaulImposter or another like skilled artist would need to pour over these selections, of which there are hundreds, to tweak and validate by. RCR has, historically been overwhelmed by mechanical change requirements of class layouts than aesthetics, which has current development focus. The better option would be communicating with the original artist that provided the custom content to the vault which we integrated from.

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 12:41 pm
by Storm Munin
Ever an awed user of created content.

What I am after is a single "outfit" shown that reveal whatever parts are deemed necessary to make an educated guess at how well the player selected face and the player selected overall body complexion work together.

An outfit that would replace the current general wardrobe upon creation (and perhaps ingame when not wearing armor).
Thus only two actual items (male/female) would have to be implemented to the files along with what I hope are small scripting changes.

Keep up the good work.

/M

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 5:22 pm
by Herisheft
Let me add to the Sorrow's post and make it easy to understand.

Even if such model would appear then it would not corelate with other impelmented models. You probably think that character AVATAR itself is a naked figure all the time, and it is clothing that is being changed. Unfortunatelly, that is not the case. Like Sorrow said, it resembles more of a lego than "dress me up Barbie".

Avatar model is separated to: Head, body, hands and legs; means that whenever You chnage clothing on either of those parts, you actually load w whole new model for it. Remember that part. Now... What a texture is, I guess I don't have to explain, but for clarity it is what you see as skin or clothing. Imagine now, that parts of models are made of clay. They already have some default slight colour on them (you can observe in character creator because everything there is set to '0'[don't ask how that work and why it is white]), and they are ready to take a new color from you, but here is the thing, your "paint" is transparent so it captures some color from the clay. Now, all vanilla models (everything that comes from original game) are made of the same clay ergo that's why those model parts will fit with color tone when you choose and glue them together. However, BG uses a moded contnent means that it was made by different people who used slightly different colors of the clay. Now return to the part about Avatars being like lego. You put your model together from different parts, comming from different people and when you paint it, you will get a mixture of tones.

So to put it simple, we would have to take, all textures and unify them so they would all fit together... and honestly that's a s**t load of very frustrating work. :) Hope i maanged to explain that in simplistic way.

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 9:34 pm
by Storm Munin
Or in other words, bummer.

Well, it was worth trying and thanks for the expanded explanation.

/M

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 6:26 am
by Endelyon
So all we have to do is put one single class in one of those awkward dresses that changes your skin color on the character creation screen. Then you at least can switch to it to know if your character is going to have burned copper skin in them when you've chosen for instance a nice olive tone for your face.

It's really not a difficult request. I'll see about packaging it with an upcoming update.

The question is which class gets the ugly dress? :lol:

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 8:30 am
by Herisheft
Endelyon, i guess that you are missing a point of this thing :D
It doesn't matter if there is going to be a naked body or partially revealed body in the creator, or no body at all. Later, the player will use appearance kit and he will change the model parts anyways and skin tone will change as well. :) Its the matter of individual parts. Like I said, we would have to unify ALL and I mean all avatar textures including faces to make it work.

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 8:56 am
by Endelyon
I'm not missing any point. I've fixed a ton of character files to even out skin tones for these specific outfits. This problem only exists with a few specific dresses when using the updated head models and can be solved universally among them by picking a more neutral skin tone at character creation.

Having one of them visible on character creation will provide the only tool necessary to make sure it doesn't come out ugly. Just because the skin tone changes when you change appearance parts doesn't have much to do with the fact that with a few specific outfits the skin tone won't match the face tone.

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 9:25 am
by Herisheft
And what if that specific neutral tone doesn't suit the needs of a player?

Re: Reveal more skin at character creation.

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 10:23 am
by Aspect of Sorrow
It will present potential issue if we extend the color palette as well in the future, though if we can extend it in NWNX and have players sink money into it...