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(12-21-2014, 04:33 PM)Tiergan Wrote: My thing is - concept artists are always thinking about silhouette. Â It's important because you want people to be able to look at a character at a glance and instantly know what they are. Â A lot of times, some concept artists will even start concepting creatures by drawing out a silhouette first and then designing on top of it.I honestly get this even more from the males than the females. If not for the horns, I'd have an extremely hard time telling them from Elezen at a glance. Heck, from the closeup we got in the video I genuinely had to take a double take to make sure it wasn't just the same face with the horns strapped on.
If we made silhouettes of all the different races, most of them would be pretty easily distinguishable ...except maybe miqo'te and midlanders if we cropped off the cat ears and tails. Â They tried to make up for it by giving them noticeably larger, cat-like eyes, a slightly different facial structure from midders - (or a very different facial structure if you have the older male miqo'te nunh face). Â If you put a hyur midder and a miqo'te side by side, you can visibly see the differences in their faces.
What we've seen of female Au Ra doesn't really do that. The silhouette just reads "female midlander with horns and tail". Â Their faces just have a few scales tacked on, but overall look like midlanders or like they're trying to squeeze the features in somewhere between midlander and miqo'te.
At the end of the day, I'm not really going to lose any sleep over it - but it's very hard to argue that the same level of work in making the male Au Ra unique went into the females too.
That said, I really like the race. I personally put a lot of weight on run and walk cycles, and from the video we saw they have what I consider the best and most natural looking run cycles in the game, especially for the males. The females seemed a tiny bit off, but I have a hard time putting my finger on why. I think their center of mass might be off if accounting for the tail.
Also while I don't really want to get too involved in the whole lazy or not discussion, from my admittedly limited understanding of the development cycle, adding a scaley skin mesh is not a very large job in comparison to what they did at all. The majority of the work would be in designing destinct animations, stances and basically anything motion related, or the parts where gear needs to be modified (the horns). On the basis of that alone I consider it a pure aesthetic decision, rather than one that has anything to do with laziness. It would have taken a relatively close amount of work to make them all scaley compared to how they are now. If they came out and the females had the same animation sets as the midlanders, then I'd agree, but from what I can tell from what we've seen of motion, they're distinctly different.
To me the word "Lazy" would mean they took a route that required a significantly lower amount of work than the alternative, which they didn't. Making a more fierce female is not a significantly more taxing process than what they made, when what they made has a new model, skeleton, and animation set. Yes the aesthetic they went for was one that was meant to appeal more to the majority and less to a niche, thats a business decision, not a sloth one.