Is what we saw on ATV a couple of weeks ago character creation or character customization? And what's the difference?

Okay, so I've always made a distinction, and this is really to preempt what we are doing for your character creation as a whole. So the first step of character creation is literally just selecting objects for your character, and that to me is customization of your character. And I mean, really, the term doesn't really matter. You can use it generally. The terms tend to get used interchangeably. To me, it's a two-phase kind of approach. Again, we want to give you all the selection of your character items first. So you select a head, a preset head. You select a body, a preset body. You select your clothing. You select your armor. And you put your character together. Now, the next step of that is actually customizing it or changing it, right? And we've shown some of the DNA system, which is something that we've been talking about and developing. We haven't developed the DNA system itself. This is coming from 3Lateral, but we've been developing with that in mind. So all of our heads are implemented with a very specific set of rig logic, so that once that system was online, that is exactly how we would actually be doing that thing. Well, not quite two years ago, but a year and a half ago, that we would be moving this direction, and that would be the end game for character creation and customization. So to me, the creation of your character, again, is just putting the pieces together, and then the customizing of the character is actually pulling it around and making your own version of that particular character and coloring up your clothing for yourself. Customizing your character. So creation, customization, kind of two stages. And the first stage that you guys are going to get is the selection of the preset heads, of the preset bodies, and putting the clothes and armor on. And then the next level will be the actual pulling around of different pieces of the face and getting it all combined.

One thing I did want to address within that, and it was just based on some of the Reddit threads that came out of that, as well as even some YouTube videos from 3Lateral's presentation at GDC, and a lot of people are like, oh, well, on the face customization, they're just combining blend shapes between a bunch of different faces. And it is far more sophisticated than that. There's no way that you could do this blend shape sort of combination and still be able to animate those faces. So the DNA system, and again, 3Lateral does a pretty good job explaining this within their presentation, but what it is, is there's a whole set of rig logic constants that are sitting in this face. Your face is actually created by these constants, this rig logic code, and that's what we call DNA. So when you're customizing it, there's like a dynamic DNA. This DNA is changing, so you're grabbing a bit of rig logic from this head, a bit of rig logic from this head, a bit of rig logic from this head, depending on where it is, and it's actually adjusting all the constants to suit. But all of those heads themselves have 444 blend shapes already. So you're not having a base head that just has a bunch of blend shapes of all the other heads. You have this base head that already has 444 corrective blend shapes within it. And when it animates, those blend shapes work. But you combine those rig logic constants onto the different areas of the face, and it will still animate correctly.

Maybe to take it even higher level, if you were ever to just animate and export an animation for a particular face, the rig is in a certain configuration. So if we took Gary Oldman's animation and we exported that on Gary Oldman's skeleton, and then we played that back on, let's say, Captain White or Liam Cunningham, his face would strangely contort to the shape of Gary Oldman's face, because all those joint positions are all coming from Gary Oldman's rig. Now, rig logic puts a generic, not really generic, but a generic control set. But the rig logic constants are all unique per head. So if you can combine pieces of those rig logic constants, you never end up contorting that face. So Liam Cunningham's face will retain its shape and still do the exact same animation that you exported off of Gary Oldman's head, rather than just assuming that shape. So hopefully that wasn't too, maybe I got a little too deep with it. And it's really better if I have some visual sort of guides. And we're going to have, I'm sure, a whole ATV to talk about this. And it'd be awesome if we could get Vlad out from 3Lateral. But again, we've implemented this right into the engine. And yeah, it's going to be really, really cool to see. I can assure you that there hasn't been a customization system before, at least not that I know of, and I don't know everything. I've never seen a customization system being able to do that. So basically be able to play normal animation at pretty true-life fidelity and be able to change exactly how that particular face looks and still be able to play those same animations.