Heights

[Oddball]

This is just something I did for curiosity's sake. I know the sprites where designed before the characters stats were actually finalized, but i was curious as to how they actually stacked up.

So I decided to re-size them to see how close they actually came. Granted, these aren't 100 percent accurate due to hair and posture and me being sloppy, but I thought they might intrest somebody here.

If nothing else, this better explains why Lilly gets referred to as an amazon. 171 cm isn't that big normally, but compared to the others, she's huge. It also makes her feud with Shizune seem even more comical.

I'm also fairly sure that Emi's height on the site comes from her without her prognostics on but since I don't have her height with her legs on ...

heightchart.png (284.83 KiB) Viewed 15129 times

Also, if you're wondering Shizune and Misha are about average height for a typical Japanese woman.

[bhtooefr]

I'm pretty sure your scaling is way off. Like way WAY off. Like everyone would be walking on stilts. Including Emi. And even Lilly would only have a foot tall torso and head.

If you're not familiar with working in metric... here's the heights in feet and inches (with Hisao at 170 cm, as some things have said - and, Akira is about the same height as Hanako canonically, so she gets listed):

Lilly: 5' 7.3" (and she's above average even for regions where tall people are the norm - Wikipedia's list only shows one region where the average female is taller, the Dinaric Alps, and as far as countries go, the tallest women on average are the Dutch, and she's taller than the average Dutch woman. That said, I wouldn't call her an Amazon at all...)
Hisao: 5' 6.9"
Hanako and Akira: 5' 4.6"
Rin: 5' 3.4"
Shizune and Misha: 5' 2.2" (exactly average for Japanese women as you said)
Emi: 4' 11.4"

I'm thinking that's Emi's height with prosthetics. If she were 4' 11.4" without prosthetics, her height with the prosthetics would be taller than Lilly. And, she's canonically tiny.

[KeiichiO]

Lilly looks like a freak of nature, and Emi looks like a midget.

The sizing is a bit wonky.

[Oddball]

All I was doing is taking the sprites and resizing them until they matched the websites stats for them. I wasn't going to try to alter proportions or anything like that.

And as I said, Emi should probably be a few cm taller ... probably, but we don't have the measurements for that.

[Steinherz]

You'd also have to take into consideration the fact that their sprites don't fully show their legs.
I do have an idea though:
If Shizune and Misha are the average height for a woman in Japan, why not use them as the base-line and modify the other sprites accordingly?

But that's just my 2cents.

[Atario]

All I was doing is taking the sprites and resizing them until they matched the websites stats for them.

I think you did that wrong. Look where their feet would end, and compare that to where the zero mark would be on that height chart. Like a mile below their feet.

Emi: 4' 11.4"

Dude. Today I learned my wife is like a half-inch taller than Emi.

[Aura]

Man what the howling hell is going on with that pic? At 20cm difference Lilly is actually less than a head taller than Emi, and the distance between her hips and head is 30 cm in the picture? You should notice within a fraction of a second that the chart can't possibly be right.

The in-game sprite graphics are scaled perfectly to the actual heights of the characters. They are ALSO very accurately scaled to Hisao's eye level, the average field of vision of the backgrounds and the distance the characters stand from each other. There's absolutely no need to fuck them up like this.

[Atario]

The in-game sprite graphics are scaled perfectly to the actual heights of the characters, there's no need to fuck them up like this.

Hey, since you're here and on the subject and paying attention and everything, check this out:

http://wok.oblomov.eu/ars/katawa-shoujo/xksd.svg

If you look at the source, the guy used the published heights to scale the figures, and gives some fairly involved rationales. For some reason, they seem much closer in height to one another than the game sprites do. Thoughts?

[Aura]

Because the art is super inconsistent we cheated at some things and hid the discrepancies below knee level because you never see that. Blame the artists. Perhaps more accurate would be to say "scaled perfectly (for some definition of 'perfect')". The inconsistency of the backgrounds disallows perfect FoV/eye level scaling too, for example. It was the best we could do with what we had.

In that picture though, while the relative heights are correct I'm sure, the proportions are crazy wacky which probably makes up most of the difference effect to game art along with the fact that the sprites don't show full body. In the game sprites (and actual humans) the head is not 20% of he total height of the body

[Atario]

Tell you what, I'm going to put it down to perspective — we're seeing things from Hisao's eye height, which would exaggerate the girls' height differences due to closeness.

Yeah.

[Munchenhausen]

Like everyone would be walking on stilts. Including Emi.

Doesn't she anyway?
Ba Dum Tssch

[bhtooefr]

I knew someone was going to say that...

[Potato]

I suddenly got a mental image of Lilly raging through Yamaku like Godzilla through Tokyo...

And damn, Emi's tiny...

[metalangel]

Dude. Today I learned my wife is like a half-inch taller than Emi.

Dude! Petite women for the win!

[Oblomov]

In that picture though, while the relative heights are correct I'm sure, the proportions are crazy wacky which probably makes up most of the difference effect to game art along with the fact that the sprites don't show full body. In the game sprites (and actual humans) the head is not 20% of he total height of the body

As the author of that picture (EDIT: wait, which picture are talking about? I mean the SVG, do you mean the PNG?), I agree that it's not perfect (yet). I am working on improving it, though, and any suggestions on how to do it are more than welcome.

Regarding the head, for example, there's an issue with it being currently fixed-size (the same for all characters), with a height of 22cm and a width of 18cm. Given the heights of the character,s this is between 13% (Lilly, 12.86%) and 15% (Emi, 14.57%) of the total body height, i.e. only slightly higher than the 1/8th (12.5%) which, in my extremely limited knowledge of the human proportions, is what is considered the ‘perfect’ head-to-total-height-ratio (1/8th for the head, 3/8ths for the torso, 4/8ths for the legs, unless I'm grossly mistaken). Yes, the effect is more significant in Emi's case, but even with the correct head size, the distance between the top of her head and the top of Lilly's head would (and should!) be limited to 20 (171-151) cm, i.e. just 2cm less of the current head size is, and just 1.4cm less than the ‘optimal’ Lilly's head size. (TLDR: even with the right head size, Lilly is less than (her) head higher than Emi —it one head higher than Emi when considering Emi's head as reference, 18.875cm, though)

Of course all of this assumes some form of parallel projection, which I'm not going to change as it would make the computations way more complex that what I intend to ever do. OTOH, suggestions on how to improve the proportions for the characters are extremely welcome (particularly concerning arms length and placement, for which the stickiness of the figure makes things even harder —they are already hard enough for me considering I completely suck at drawing in general and the human figure in particular).