Muscular Women...Again!

No, I've got to agree. Even the picture that Samuel_Tow posted, that woman's legs are twice the diameter of her biceps. Her waist is only slightly wider than one of her legs. Take a look at that picture of She-Hulk again, her legs do not look like that.

The problem is that the Physique Slider is proportional, so wider body parts become even wider in proportion. Moving the slider out increases the leg diameter more than the arms. There really does need to be a slider that balances the upper and lower body out, expanding the upper body while contracting the lower. (or just leaving it alone) And I'd want this for males, too, there are many of my male characters that I want to have large upper bodies and long, lanky legs, particularly for my werewolf and dragon characters, and you can't do that.

Samuel_Tow's pictures are also obviously covering up the woman's shoulders in order to make them appear larger. (That is why they look like "fantasy", it isn't because that's the style he's looking for) The other issue is that a muscular build, unlike a stocky one, is wider at the thickest points, but NOT at the joints. Again, She-Hulk's legs, while large in the thighs, are well defined in the knee and calves. But that's true of arms as well, and I don't see any way to change that without overly complicating how the Physique Slider works.

I'll also point out, as I have plenty of times before, that while it is possible to increase or decrease the depth of the male chest, it isn't for females, as that is their Breast slider. So when the Physique is at its minimum, the chest is actually by default too deep. It sticks forward too much. The Physique slider should actually increase diameter more in the X direction in the chest and waist, and more in the Z direction in the arms and legs. But it would probably just be easier to make that a separate slider as it is for males.

A new texture would certainly be simpler to implement, but it could really only give the illusion of more definition. It would be better than nothing, though.

At the moment maybe. Hercules was mainstream earlier in his career and even had a bit of a comeback recently. Ares was one of the more popular member of the Avengers.

But mostly, my examples were just to show that the fantasy aesthetic is alive and well in superhero comics. That's what I love about them. The genre is so broad that it incorporates everything from fantasy to steampunk to cyperpunk to noir and so on.

Heck, we've already got armor, swords, and shields in the costume creator; why WOULDN'T we want Conan-style musclature to go along with it?

As for not seeing the physical oddities I mentioned.... well, I can't really say anything to that. It seemed unmissable to me. If I have the time and motivation later, maybe I'll take a screenshot of what I'm talking about.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

As a total aside to the topic of this thread...

It can be funny when you examine the actions taking place in some panel's illustrations.

My first thought was... Is this Thundra's devastating double-breast-wallop special maneuver?

Then I was thinking that she and Hulk were doing a chest bump celebration when their basketball team scored.

However, I think what really is going on needs some slow, overly romantic music to the slow motion action of Thundra and Hulk running towards their loving embrace!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

In both pictures, I've had to cheat a LOT with the sliders, and I've just about maxed out what's possible. Both women have their "muscle" (which for women translates into "butt" for some reason) slider, and the waists of both are almost as high as the waist slider will go. The green one has very narrow hips, just to make her butt look slightly less giant when she bends over for combat pose, as well. When you push the sliders as much as I have, the models start to behave in weird ways.

I have to agree with this. I have a general taste for aesthetics which favours longer legs and larger feet, and not just for women. The problem, especially with women with the sliders set high, is that they end with giant breasts and giant butts, but tiny little hands and feet. That's one of the reasons both of the characters I posted are wearing large boots and gloves. These are the only options in the game with a larger hand and foot size This is especially true for characters with digitigrade legs, hooves to be precise. I tend to want these to be big, but the game simply won't let me, as I can't control hand and foot size. This is especially noticeable on the Huge model where the chest balloons much faster than anything else.

Precisely. I often say I have to "cheat" to get that kind of muscular look, for the simple fact that I have to cover up the model's key points with bulky gear to make her look like she's bigger than she is. In both instances, I've used large shoulder pads to both elevate and extend the shoulders, larger gloves and boots to make the hands and feet bigger, and actually very small heads to make their bodies seem bigger than they actually are. My methods may be questionable, but one REALLY has to push the editor to produce anything even remotely like this, which I think speaks to a limitation in the editor, itself.

The body sliders are VERY limited, and this touches on something I've talked about before. The female waist is too thin at all slider settings, because the waist slider only works sideways. It can make the waist wider or narrower, but it cannot make it thicker or thinner front-to-back. The "chest" slider isn't worth mentioning, but widening the chest IS possible via the shoulders slider. Only that still works left-to-right only, and leaves the actual rib cage flat. You can, in effect, make a woman in City of Heroes wider or narrower, but you can't give her any real volume beyond the mislabelled "muscle" slider.

And then there's this. Yes, precisely. I originally made this to prove a point, which is that the game - as it is right now - can draw up a muscular female texture in a way that's at least passable. If I could do this with NO artistic skills and a piece of software that was outdated five years ago, an actual artist with access to development tools should be able to make something far, far better. What I did was nothing more complicated than replacing the female skin textures with the male tights textures (because the make skin textures have nipples O.o), and it's still been good enough that a fair few people have actually liked it enough to want to use THAT in the game.

I make no qualms about this: I suck. An actual professional can likely do much, much better than my hack job. And the mere fact that this always gets so much attention when I post it tells me that there's room in the game for a female muscular texture.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

i just see hulk yelling MOTORBOAT! but then again, i'm 5.

and brand, well, then you pretty much laid it out, we want the game to go in different directions, you want them to stay limited in the spandex look of more classic comics, i keep trying to expand the game's choices to include a broader influence of graphic novels and manga. For this particular discussion, i dont think it will affect you that much for them to make what amounts to one or two tops and one or two bottoms options with a bit more definition. not an amazing amount of work and it works for those of us who would appreciate it, you will still have your more simple, cleaner looks to make with you characters and we all can coexist.

i still disagree strongly with you about the sliders though, raising physique on the female model makes them puffy, not defined, simply cinching the waist does nothing to remedy that, as i said before, a convincing look muscular character is going to have definition on top of a lean physique, the current physique slider makes them look fat rather than powerful because it just widens the existing physique, rather than just the areas that muscular development would occur. thus we get the Jennifer Lopez with a massive cheesecake effect, which im not upset with, mind you , but it aint a good look for me making a powerful street fighter type female character. i want to make that character here, she exists elsewhere, where there are more sliders, but i'd prefer her here, and implementing this would make it possible to do here.

I'll agree with "puffy," but if we consider that there's nothing we can do about the model at large, I feel that by FAR the largest problem with female models is the skinny arms. The only real way to make a female look like she has muscular arms is to crank the muscle slider all the way to the right, which does give her decent arms... But also gives her a continental butt.

The only solution that I can see to that is to just give women the ability to swap their hands. Now, I've been saying this for a while, but that's not as wild as it sounds. Foreshadow already does that. Seriously, go to the hollows and check him out. That's what those rings around his shoulders are for. The way he does it, it looks like, is to use the existing Robotic Arms tech, only his robotic arms aren't robotic. They're human. That's why he gets those big unique biceps. Yeah, I'll admit it would be weird to have the rings on women (they're what helps the arms join the torso in a non-ugly way), but it's better than nothing.

A proper muscular texture would help, because those tend to give definition to the muscles and make them look like they're bigger than they are, making women's sausage arms look like they have a bit more shape to them. This doesn't change the model, but it LOOKS better. Moreover, having actual arm swaps would help significantly, as well. It would let us keep a leaner body while still having bigger arms.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Really, really trying not to mention the "goiter" here, when you push the male model to the max Physique -- and obviously failing.

That was what I was going to say, with my overmuscled character Blue Diamond (I was going for the Huge look without the thick neck and hunched posture) I began to really have a problem with the sleeveless jacket. As the shoulders expanded, so did the space between the shoulders and the jacket, to the point where it actually made the shoulders look SMALL in comparison.

What I finally ended up doing is putting short sleeves on the jacket, and then making them the same color as the t-shirt over the arms. The difference in color made it look like the shoulders were still sticking out of the jacket, instead of being sleeves, but the resulting "shoulders" were quite a bit larger. That might be an option with one of your female characters, getting away from the "armor" look.

Should I admit that I've done this? Should I also admit that it looks pretty grotesque?

Um, yeah. Anyway, as you said, it would be easily possible for the costume folks to come up with a texture with more feminine-looking abs than that.

yep, i mentioned this way upthread. i also mentione it might be time to get monstrous arms too, maybe alien muscular(like namekians with the two tone ribbed muscles) crustacean, spiny mutant, with spikes like the mutant wings and such so yeah signed to heck and back, maybe even we could use these to sneak in tattoed forearms, maybe getting the attachment to look natural might be an issue, but i'm sure it could be worked around by the talented group we have here. but i think this would be a very good idea

You know...it could just be Sam's pics throwing me off. They're way more defined than the images you showed, which makes a difference imo.

They're more defined because they use the male skin textures. It's the only thing I had to work with

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.