Barefoot player characters

[hynaku]

Once during the Stormblood expansion update it had a bug that deleted the barefoot sandals for my character. If update bug can do it pretty sure it wouldn't be hard for them to do the same.

[VeyaAkemi]

I probably should've phrased it better. They can alter our height but that just scales up the skeleton like the height slider does, it doesn't alter where our character's root sits on the z-axis. If they could do it then we would have high-heeled shoes that dynamically affect where our feet are in relation to the ground...like wearing actual heels does.

Not just this, but we actually have a few shoes that have heels, and they make your character's leg shorter, this is extremely visible with 2B's boots, which have a rather high heel, try going barefoot, measuring your character's leg(as in, take a screenshot and measure the pixels), then equip 2B boots, and measure it again, it will make it very visible what is actually happening there.

...actually never mind, I will do it myself.



Any shoe with heels will need to do the same trick, and rescaling the character isn't an alternative because it won't simply make you taller, it will change your body proportions across the board, the sandals exist to give your character some clearance and not need for every single shoe in the game to do resize your legs.

[Doopliss]

In previous Moonfire Faire events they scattered a few female NPCs that have no shoes on at all with their swimsuits, since they modeled a sandalless Y'shtola for the scene where she got pulled from the lifestream. There's also a sandalless model for Lalafell because of the scene where Nanamo is recovering in her bed in HW. It is possible for them to do this, but it looks like since the heeled sandals are the shortest set height they have for characters with their legs unobscured (meaning they can't really hide any awkward anatomy adjustments behind long boots or long heels), the heel of the foot actually does float a bit from the ground when completely bare. I actually assume this is why they don't give us a barefoot model, rather than any other reason (though this is basically what Absurdity was saying too).

Personally, I don't really mind the slight floating and would like the have the option regardless... There are plenty of glamours and reasons as to why somebody might not want the awkward heeled sandals stuck to their feet and would think that compromise is worth it.

[Asari5]

yes pls

not being able to be bare foot just seems oddly restrictiv.

[Shistar]

That might hold some water if they weren't completely fine with making other humanoid characters barefoot. Succubi don't wear sandals, Asura (most people probably forgot this boss existed) doesn't wear sandals, Shiva (Ryne edition, the questionable E8S 2nd phase one) doesn't wear sandals.

Minfilia in her Word of the Mother outfit is barefoot, too. Straight up female midlander, good enough for us to use, already in the game and has been for a long time, too. But yeah, it is most likely the floating issues Doopliss mentioned. Still, I really wouldn't mind it since we also do plenty of regular floating on certain surfaces that are uneven/a little oddly made.

[Alicie]

I probably should've phrased it better. They can alter our height but that just scales up the skeleton like the height slider does, it doesn't alter where our character's root sits on the z-axis. If they could do it then we would have high-heeled shoes that dynamically affect where our feet are in relation to the ground...like wearing actual heels does.

There's absolutely no issue throwing extra parameter in for gear called Y-offset and actually using it to calculate model offset relative to the ground. But you know, it's effort, even if it's very little effort, and any effort needs to be justified. Can they extract extra cash out of players by doing so? Questions, questions. People buy stuff from mog station regularly anyway, for now there's probably no urgent need to boost sales.

[Absurdity]

There's absolutely no issue throwing extra parameter in for gear called Y-offset and actually using it to calculate model offset relative to the ground. But you know, it's effort, even if it's very little effort, and any effort needs to be justified. Can they extract extra cash out of players by doing so? Questions, questions. People buy stuff from mog station regularly anyway, for now there's probably no urgent need to boost sales.

It sounds easy, but is it actually in practice? No clue how their engine does things, so who knows. If it were easy however it probably would have been less effort than having to shorten our legs/ankles every time they want to add heels to a pair of shoes.

A quick search tells me that plugins can already do this, but they also use a custom API. Wouldn't surprise me if some of the modding tools are better than whatever the devs have to work with.

And you're absolutely right, they would have to justify spending resources on a system like that, there probably isn't enough demand for it. I bet most people haven't even noticed that wearing heels doesn't make your character any taller, just your legs shorter.

[SalamanderIX]

Barefooted NPCs have shown up in the game before in some events around Costa Del Sol, there's a model in the game for it at least. They do look like they're standing on their toes.

Redoing all the heels and adding Y offsets seems like a bit of a waste of time, though changing the Y offset for just one barefoot model or just.. elongating the legs or feet a small bit wouldn't be so bad.

[LeCorbeaux]

So this piqued my interest, and I grabbed the Endless Summer Sandals model to see how the bones are set up.



And they're mostly what you'd expect. Quite simple, in fact.

There's a small central bone (named "hara", possibly for "腹"/"stomach" or "belly") which when translated moves the whole body, and attached to it a larger "kosi" ("腰"/"waist") one which moves the whole lower body. There's also a chain of three "sebo" ("背骨"/"backbone") above it in other models, but shoes obviously don't need it. They're meant for rotation, but moving them a bit is fine if you want to stretch the belly.

From there, the bone structure splits off into a pair of five "asi" ("足"/"leg") each: Hips, two for the knees (standard industry practice to allow for less distortion of the patella area when animating it), ankle, and finally one each at the metatarsus (which is slightly off the ground, but then, so are many footwear models).



Of importance for the discussion is that the last bone actually has corresponding weights in the toes, so it's not just used to determine where the feet should end up to be "on the surface". So to make the character stand on their toes, you can move the whole body by translating the root "hara" bone upwards, and adding rotation to the last two foot bones ("asi_d" and "asi_e").



This doesn't shorten the legs, nor does it change the position (that's based on the object origin); it just makes the whole character taller by however much you translated the "hara" bone upwards.



You can do very much the same in the opposite direction too.

The only remaining question is if the engine supports translating individual bones. Many early and even current simple ones only allow for rotation.

[Valence]

Not just this, but we actually have a few shoes that have heels, and they make your character's leg shorter, this is extremely visible with 2B's boots, which have a rather high heel, try going barefoot, measuring your character's leg(as in, take a screenshot and measure the pixels), then equip 2B boots, and measure it again, it will make it very visible what is actually happening there.

...actually never mind, I will do it myself.



Any shoe with heels will need to do the same trick, and rescaling the character isn't an alternative because it won't simply make you taller, it will change your body proportions across the board, the sandals exist to give your character some clearance and not need for every single shoe in the game to do resize your legs.

The characters in the game are split into multiple sections (chest, legs, ankles/feet, arms, forearms, hands, head, tail, etc). When you equip a pair of shoes the game swaps the feet model with the model of the shoes. In the case of those high heels, the 3D modelers just chose to model it that way, which essentially gets rid of the whole upper section of the feet part in order to make room for the whole heel. Shins look shorter with the heels as a result.

In short the shoes you equip can look like anything you want in theory as long as their upper part attaches to the bottom of the legs part. This of course generates anatomical differences between certain pieces like here. Not that character anatomy is correct especially on female characters in the first place anyway... (it's a mess)