Here's a character concept I'm working on: futuristic melee-oriented armor, designed to not restrict movement, protect vital areas from attack, allow navigation in hostile environments, and be worn by a female. Now, I used MakeHuman to generate a base model, since I didn't want to spend a year or so practicing making humans for a one-off project. I then removed the eyes, mouth, belly button, and other extraneous details to get the following result, which is pretty clearly female, if athletically so: I then threw on a spandex undersuit, armor, a rebreather, and some arm blades, rigged it, and got this: And everyone's saying "That's not female! That's a [gay] male with moobs!" I tweaked the mesh a bit to clear up the chest area and narrow the waist very slightly, and animated it in the hopes that that would help make the point clear: And as it stands, people are still thinking that she's male. Now, clearly one way to make the gender clear is just to overemphasize the hell out of it - inflate the breasts a size or five, narrow the waist down to Victorian proportions, make her walk like a ballet dancer. I don't really want to go that route. For all that "futuristic" and "melee" don't go together, I want this to be a practical design, worn by a practical person. This means that armor takes up space; areas that would be thin on a female end up being flat because of armor (and areas that would be flat on a male end up bulging slightly). It also means that I can't plausibly show hair, which would get destroyed pretty quickly, and that the mouth area is covered by the rebreather. And it means that the person wearing it isn't going to flounce about when she walks. Basically, I'm out of traditional gender clues, and yet, because I find it so irritating that people keep getting the gender wrong, I want to find some way to show the gender. Am I screwed? Oh, and any comments on the model or animation are welcome too. Right now my only major concern is that the shoulder rig gives painful-looking results when the arm is in tight, as it is in the walk cycle.

How about an armored purse?

Seriously, though...

If the intent is to design awesome armor that can be worn by a female, then it shouldn't matter if people can tell. Chalk it up as a byproduct of a well-designed product.

If the intent is to design something that LOOKS like awesome armor that can be worn by a female, with the stipulation that she must be recognizable as a female, then you might have to add some superfluous clues... maybe something hair-related?

Quote: Original post by smitty1276
How about an armored purse?

If the intent is to design awesome armor that can be worn by a female, ... If the intent is to design something that LOOKS like awesome armor that can be worn by a female, ...

You hit it.

The easiest one is that women walk differently than men. Your animation doesn't show it. That's one of the biggest cues.

For more obvious cues, the most often used is a combination of cleavage and body armor that doesn't protect much. Since you claim you want practical armor, those are both out.


On the other hand, practical body armor doesn't show gender very well unless you are up close. It is difficult to show gender cues like natural-size breasts when the character is two inches tall.

[google] "Samus is a woman?!?"

I don't think it's so much in the mode of walking. It looks like a pretty normal walk to me (though motion is a very subtle and finicky art, so who knows?).

What you've done is shown how grossly exaggerated cultural cues have produced unreal norms and expectations in the gender representation of women in video/computer games: If a woman is not portrayed as having very large breasts/small waist and clothed in what is effectively lingerie no matter what the occasion, they fail to signal themselves as "woman" (or would that be "chick"?). It's a similar situation in (western) comics, I think: Men can be portrayed as having a variety of body shapes while women are restricted to a very narrow "ideal" representation.

As you may have picked up from my tone, I think that it's a very sad state of affairs. Tell the nay-sayers to grow up and look at women's body shapes and dress in actual practical occupations rather than relying on the mutant sex-doll echo-chamber that dominates our corner of media. Ok, pretty much all media.

I think the addition of hair, perhaps in a tight pony tail thing starting somewhere near the top of the head, will swing it. The bald head looks male, and people will probably look to the face first. If the hair is not loose then it is still reasonably practical (always behind the head).

Horrible MSPaint job:

Hair is a concern - the model as currently designed has basically no room for it at all, which implies that the character underneath is bald, which isn't something I particularly like the thought of. However, I can't plausibly have the hair outside of the armor either, since among other things it needs to protect against hard vacuum...let alone my plans to include lava and acid! The upshot is that I could improve realism a bit by padding out the head area in places, but I hardly thing it would make her look more feminine. Maybe if I went the opposite direction, and had a long braid that was bound to the back? That'd probably just end up looking like a deformed spine, though. Maybe, maybe I can convince myself it's plausible to have hair "loose" but still under wraps - sort of like shrinkwrapped braids or something. Then the big problem is animating it realistically, since hair tends to get everywhere...

If you have suggestions for how I could improve that walk cycle, please, by all means, share them! Animations are hard, and while I'm miles better than I was when I started, I'm hardly lifelike yet.

Thanks for the link to that study, dbaumgart. I pretty much anticipated how it would play out, but the graph was interesting, as was the extremely small standard deviation for female body weights.

If you're happy with the model and proportions, could you possibly play with the colours and patterns to suggest gender? The shoulders and chest colouring suggests a bodybuilder-style vest, perhaps pull the blue in closer to the center and tighter around the neck to suggest a swimsuit-style top? Possibly something similar around the hips too.

I think if you are going the realistic way, you should design your suit with all practical ideas in mind, and then show her in the company of a similarly clad male figure, which in this case would be bulked up more around the chest and shoulders.

When shown side-by-side, it should be easy to see which is which. In this case, it's difficult because we don't have anything to compare it with.

Sorry, but a quick glance at my journal shows my fondness of the "ideal" stereotype and lingerie (afterall, if I wanted realism I would go outside).

The best suggestion I could come up with is to make the armor pink. No self-respecting man would wear that and it should clear up all confusion. Or give you an army of gay super-soldiers. One of the two.

I think it's a combination of a case of "male" being the default gender associated to gender-neutral characters in our culture (look at stick figures for another example such as those at xkcd) combined with the way the shadowing looks on your character; at a glance the patterns on that body suit look like male musculature.

The easiest thing would be to add a female-specific feature to the character (what I like to call the "slap a bow and lipstick on her" approach). An alternative might be to make the male characters more masculine looking so she looks more feminine.

Or you could just go with ambiguously gender neutral; give him/her a name like Alex or Leslie and make the player make up their own mind on gender [smile].