Yes, generally skeletal structure doesnt change when a person gains weight, your skeleton doesnt get wider, your bones not thicker. So it is not needed to make a custom skeleton for a plus size character unless its really extremely unique design like IlJah for example. Therefore you can sculpt a thicker character on the skeletal proportions of a Maya skeleton and still come out with good looking results, like our Mercer has shown.
I chose to make a new skeleton for Shey because I wanted some more diversity in our cast than just thickness/fitness. A big woman is also a very well recieved addition that many people are into (myself too, thats also why I made her
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It requires a new skeleton because no amount of superficial adjustments can fix the mismatch in the animations. With mercer its just needed to edit animations to match the new body volume. An overall bigger character will have much harder issues to fix when applied an animation of a smaller skeleton, such as the penetration happening at a completely different spot, and so on.
Im also starting to think it might be a cool thing if I actually make a behind the scenes video that shows some of these things and explains more visually why certain things are easier to fix than others. Oh well some other time ill get to do that
The main characters for each skeleton are: Maya, Shey, Max, Sethro, Bol, IlJah, Kral, Zuri, Tali, Rawn, Rasha, Grok, Djablo, Corbac. Each other character is a body variation of one of these. That means they can indeed have a widely different model (just look at Gulhragg, our rhino guy compared to his skeletal brother Grok). But the key positions at which his body moves are shared and so can animation be shared to a great extent.
Yeah this is something that even high budget productions (im talking extremely high, well in the double digit millions) like EAs UFC games have spent years of work and brain power by some of their smartest developers to come up with systems like these. Things that for now sadly are beyond our reach but hopefully will indeed someday be available for us indie devs too.
Its really flattering you see it that way and does indeed motivate me to keep working towards our goal of finishing this game and making it the best it can be.
Yes totally, Mercer and Shey and Shannon are what I would consider our first entries in this category with more coming in for sure that are also more clearly milfy and visibly in their 40s+