If your goal is to make the characters look younger then you have to resize some proportions.
With age the head goes smaller compared to the rest of the body, the hands go bigger, the body stretches up, the nose becomes thiner, the eyes smaller, the head less round.
To make them go younger just invert all these parameters.
Try to make their nose less thin, even bigger. Also, resize the head by 8% or 6%.

Size is very important for make believe. In anime, all the girls are smaller than the boys, like in real life. What you see in anime girls are, besides the big eyes and small nose/mouth ratio to the rest of the head, is features that don't do much with height. Instead, the anime girls are rather small. What they have is disproportionate, or over exagerated feminine features like big breasts, thin waists, round glutes (unless the fetiche is petite, where the girls look like early teens or even childs).

I guess from that image that the characters are over 1m80. Is that your goal?

Also the thin nose makes them rather older by a 10 or 15 year factor (if your intention was 16/18 teens).

Making the nose bigger is not an option for the anime look. Your frame of reference is valid for realistic looking people, not for anime where the nose is practically non existent. I do agree there are a couple of easy body proportion issues I could solve quite easily though. And to make them look younger the jaw needs to be less defined, face more heart shaped, and more facial fat. Thanks for your input though, really appreciate it!

palmer_aif wrote:Making the nose bigger is not an option for the anime look. Your frame of reference is valid for realistic looking people, not for anime where the nose is practically non existent.

That's an impossible task to do in 3D then. In anime, it's easy to do. You just don't draw the nose and either put 2 little dots for nostrils or you draw a shadow at right or left to simulate 3d and that's the nose in japanese manga. You look at it and it's like the characters don't have a nose at all. But when the shot is taken from the side, we see that they have a nose, and sometimes a rather big one, for men, that has nothing to do with the nose they have from the front. You see a lot of dichotomy with noses in japanese manga and anime.
But that's almost impossible to do in 3D. Either you make a character without a nose at all or you have to put one there. And if you do you'll definitly see a normal nose when the shot is from the front, because of shadows or diferent skin tones on the face adjacent to it.

You tried to compensate it by making the nose very thin. But when I look at it, I make a comparison of that nose with noses like that in real life and you see those kind of noses mostly with older people, because with age the nose grows and gets thiner.

In this fun vid we have a middle ground between japanise anime and disney style characters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SMpZxhlh_8
Most japanese 3d anime come closer to a more western style of drawing for the reasons I mentioned. And not only because of the nose. The eyes cause big problems too in 3D. As you turn the head in 3d the big eyes would look odd as they would have to go around the head too.

There are ways to create a 3D character with an anime style but the geometry of the skull and of most of the features is completely different.
By essence, anime is a very flat design. If you are to go with a small nose, you should probably start by dropping the relatively anatomically correct nose shape.
I remember an interesting study made by one of the lead character artist at Trion on creating a model of Hatsune Miku.
It was his first attempt at anime style in 3D, and he gave a lot of details about the various challenges he had to face. If I can find it again I will send you the link if you are interested.

KMT wrote:There are ways to create a 3D character with an anime style but the geometry of the skull and of most of the features is completely different.
By essence, anime is a very flat design. If you are to go with a small nose, you should probably start by dropping the relatively anatomically correct nose shape.
I remember an interesting study made by one of the lead character artist at Trion on creating a model of Hatsune Miku.
It was is first attempt at anime style in 3D, and he gave a lot of details about the various challenges he had to face. If I can find it again I will send you the link if you are interested.

Please try to find it, I would really appreciate it

I remember seeing something about a 3d hatsune miku for a racing game or team. She seemed fairly realistic and still had an anime appearance. There's also several versions on Grand Theft Auto forums but she has an inverted teardrop-shaped face. One version has no nose or mouth and the eyes look painted on. Another version has a softened face but the features still look painted on. Problem with that is it goes towards the "nonhuman" side of the uncanny valley. I'm guessing you want to err more on the side of keeping it more on the "human" end of the spectrum while maintaining anime proportions.
I found this over at blenderartists.org ...http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?104094-Anime-gone-wrong-Wow!-Uncanny-valley!

Not sure about them. They look like as from anime. But maybe it was a purpose.

Bonjour Palmer,

Les personnages sont bien proportionnés, si l'on fait exception des yeux.
Au moins on ne trouve pas de seins démesurément grossis ou autres attributs disproportionnés, présents dans quelques jeux.
Par ailleurs les scénarios de tes jeux sont vraiment travaillés.

Bravo et merci.

Mortze may be right. You made the noses smaller by making them thinner. If you look at many of the more cartoony figures at Daz like Hitomi, Kimberly, Aiko 4, Keiko 6, Star!, and Cookie!, the noses are made smaller by flattening them not thinning them.

You've been sculpting and resculpting your characters for a long time now. It might be easier to simply buy some pre-made characters that have the look you want. I'm just a Daz newbie but I've been finding that it might be cheaper and faster to simply buy a lot of characters made by professionals and mix their shapes than to buy the morphs and try to dial-in shapes that look good.

LostTrout wrote:You've been sculpting and resculpting your characters for a long time now. It might be easier to simply buy some pre-made characters that have the look you want.

There are none

Anyway, here's the new version, after taking into account everyone's feedback (Not Safe For Work). Pretty much final though some minor changes remain:

I like the new one a lot.

I like the model. You can still see the anime influence but it doesn't jump out at you like its saying "Hey look! I'm anime!". If you've been to Roswell, New Mexico and hung out more than a second in one of those tourist traps, she does bear a passing resemblance to their version of an alien. I've never seen one nor do I remember being abducted so I couldn't verify that for you.
However, I think you've accomplished what you've set out to do and I like the result.

The new one looks great, a near perfect balance between realism and anime. The eyes are still a little freaky, I'm not sure if they can be made smaller and still retain the anime look, maybe just 5-10% smaller?

I like the model a lot. Now since we are talking 3D models, how does the model look from another angle? Does the nose work in profile? Is the model a little less "hippy" than the first set in this thread?

The no nose thing is from lazy, low budget anime or a product of manga artists trying to meet deadlines. Seinen anime has better designs, jaw movement etc. That's a better standard to shoot for.