Each of these faces would be viable for Humans, even if right now some of them are expressly for Elves or Dwarves or whatever.įinally, I'd also like to suggest that most users will not have a ton of technical language at the ready to really describe what they're seeing here or what they'd like to see when it comes to more facial morphology or skull shape. Note how all the faces (sans Gith) are actually Human faces, despite Larian gatekeeping them into different Fantasy race categories. How frustrating it is to have the various cosmetic features reset for each race, and also how there is no way to "clear all" to get back to the default. Also how much more difficult it is for the player to find what they want (or at least something close to what they want), when they can't see the heads arranged together for a more comparative selection process. Note just how different the impression is when we are able to see all these heads presented together in rows, rather than cycling through them one at a time. Right now in BG3, and for the females especially, we see a significant degree of overlap.
That 125 number assumes that for each of those heads, the morphology is sufficiently distinct such that there is not a high degree of overlap. The number is not arbitrary, it is what is needed at the low end, to create the requisite impression of variety that we see on offer out there in the real world. I have proposed many times in various places that the magic number for heads is 250 (or 125 heads for each sex). Also so we can see that, there too, there is high degree of continuity and homogeneity, though not quite as extreme as with the females. Later when I have more time, I will edit in the males as a point of contrast. While BG3 adopts a different sort of formalism than most cartoons, I believe the same is occurring here, and it becomes pretty clear when you see them presented all at once. I wanted to begin with the Female heads, because it is a frequent criticism in popular cartooning and animation that female heads/faces are typically approached with a greater degree of formalism and less variety on offer than male heads. So again I used Skin Neutral 6, Eyes Brown 1, No Makeup, and the wild hair in Brown-Black (which conveniently covers most of the ears, while still showing the brow in full focus, and which was also available for all the races.) Just like skin tone, a different haircut can give a very different overall impression too, but in this thread I want to offer for your consideration the actual shapes of the skulls and main features, the structure as it were rather than the surface. It was pretty tedious to undo that randomization, so that we could get a clearer picture here, and also to show where things like complexion and makeup have been more or less baked-in to the heads on offer. The game attempts to do this (as you may have noticed yourself) by choosing a random hair style and color, eye color, skin tone and makeup combination for each race or sub-race as it's first default. (added Gith at the bottom)Ĭlearly it is very possible to give a very different impression and present a sort of faux variety by altering colors. In art terms we'd say that the Githyanki have be drawn from the imagination, whereas all the rest are representational or 'drawn from life.' So it seemed more fruitful for this discussion to set them aside for the time being to focus on the bigger picture.
I have excluded Githyanki for now, because unlike the rest, those head models were very obviously sculpted using a fantastical template, rather than being 'scanned' from actual faces. I used the same crop for each at around 400x400 pixels, and presented them in order by the numbers head 1, 2 etc for each Race. I very deliberately selected the same skin tone, eye color, and hairstyle with no makeup for each, to avoid unnecessary distractions and make it easier to focus on the morphology rather than the cosmetic elements like coloration.