the helmet in your model does not seem to cover the whole head. so it would be plausible that hair could be seen on the sides of the head and pulled back into a pony tail or let hanging freely.

as for the model, while i agree with above posts that say that female modes are vastly over developed i would have to say that yours is vastly under developed.
you don't have to give your character outrageous 48 DDD breasts but your model design seems to have a couple of grapes taped to the chest.

a simple marginal increase in the bust size and a shapelier profile would give a more feminine appearance while keeping it to a more realistic size.

I'm no artist but a few things stand out to me. First the shoulders seem very level and man like. Maybe drop them just a fraction? Give a little bit more of a tapered look to them.

Next the face could probably be touched up to look a bit more feminine. I think maybe the cheek bones need to be a little more pronounced, and I can't really tell in your images but the jawline, at least to me can be the biggest tell on the face. Get some reference photos and see if that helps at all.

The breasts look a bit like saggy man pecks. A bit like an ex steroid using body builder who's let himself go. They need a bit more shape, a bit more roundness. They don't have to be large, in fact in such a fitting suit they will probably be pressed fairly hard against the chest, but they will still hold a roundish shape.

One last thing I noticed was in the animations the waist is fairly fixed. Give it a little bit more swing and it'll look more feminine.

All that being said it looks pretty good now, if you really want it to look feminine without the obvious visual cues (hair, breasts, handbag etc) it can get pretty tricky as our eyes are pretty highly tuned to the tiny details in humans, after all, we've all spent our lives looking at them! So a few very minor adjustments will give the figure a much different feel.

Anyway, is there anything wrong with a little bit of sexual ambiguity in the character? It may make them a little bit more of an interesting character.

Its quite simple. The real structural differences between male and female are face/facial hair,chest, and pelvis (and only the pelvis is a sufficient skeletal difference). The cultural differences are face, frame bulk (slender, linebacker-like, etc), curves, hair, etc.

Here's the difference between your model and a quick paintover to turn it into a male:
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The structural differences are hardly noticable- they should be exaggerated to read as a female, or else it will be assumed as a male. The cultural looks are all obscured by the gender-neutral armor, which covers her face, curves, suppliments her frame, etc. As has been stated, hair will help.

I think the Hellgate video Blur did has a male and female in similar outfits? Also look at create-a-character sci-fi games with male and females for ideas on how to take the same equipment and make it tailored for male and female.

Move her waist up slightly, so that the ratio of her torso to her legs is something like 45:55 (whereas a male is closer to 50:50), and make it slightly narrower. That'll do it.

I think the problem is with the Make Human model, it looks too "male", look at the jaw bone, it shouldn't be sharp at all in a female, the frontal bone is too broad, the breasts are simple extrusions of the Pectoralis major muscles down and to the front, they definitely need more work than that.

The muscles are too defined, this is not so noticeable on the arms, but look at the tights, I think they shouldn't be as defined where they meet the knee and they should definitely hold more fat near the pelvis.

Your animations look a bit rigid, I can see that the pelvis rotates a bit on the "UP" as it wobbles up and down, it should also rotate a bit on the "FRONT" axis as the legs fall and rise from the floor.

I thought the female space marine armor in Mass Effect looked pretty good. The armor looks somewhat practical, but the character's gender is clear.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone! Now obviously there are limits to what I'm willing to do; I don't want to make drastic modifications to the design just to emphasize gender. But I'm calling out a few of the ideas here that I really liked:

* Make the base model actually female. Right now what I have is female in parts, but androgynous in others (c.f. shoulders). If I start over with something that's more plausibly female, even if not overemphasized, then I should get better results.

* Get clever with the armor design. Not to leave bare skin where there should be protection, or to exaggerate features, but to suggest more feminine shapes.

* Show comparison shots between the female and male versions. This has the drawback of requiring me to make a male version of the suit too, but I'd been considering doing that anyway.

Animations can do a lot to suggest gender, but only if you're very good at them, and while I'm steadily improving, it'll be a long time before I can pull off that kind of body language. Hair, done right, would be effective, but it would also be a royal pain to animate, unfortunately, plus I still haven't figured out how it would work with the suit concept. And I just can't bring myself to color a heroine in pink, though I'm amused that that's one of the things that Bioware did for Mass Effect. :)

I found this thread funny hehe. Personally I thought it was a guy from even the first nude image. The differences in male and female can be annoyingly similar but it's those subtle things that sets us apart (cos even though there can be very feminine males and very masculine females, we generally can still tell who is female and who is male)

So I just had to do a little paintover to try to make her look more female.


The face on the original was WAY too masculine, females have much softer features so I tried to do that in the paintover. The eyebrows is usually raised up in a curve more than in males, I notice on males they're usually pretty straight and they also tend to have thicker eyebrows. I also made her taller, could just be a personal preference, but generally in art, 7.5-8 heads high is ideal or else it looks very unappealing imo.

If you don't want to tweak it too much just try to fix the face up a bit because that is the main reason I think it looks like a guy atm since most of the body is covered or going to be anyway.

Making the armour to show off more feminine features on the body is definitely a good idea. But also do exaggerate just a bit. Show off that the female body has curves, esp around the waist, and boobs, make the boobs stand out with some design that offsets them apart from the rest.
Try to avoid hulky armour that hides any curves.

Hope that helped.

EDIT: hmm how come image isn't showing up?
Here's the link to it

I was browsing through DAZ 3D and found this it may give you some inspiration, the armor by Uzilite is also very good.





Slightly off topic:

I could swear I saw a discussion regarding using DAZ bought models in games in which Yann (pretty certain it was him, but there is a small chance it was not) asserted it was very legal, though they are too high poly to be used "as is".

Edit: Found the Thread

[Edited by - Kwizatz on December 26, 2007 2:29:23 PM]