The two character design approaches I'm familiar with are the traditional choose from a number of presets approach or the newer, actually being able to edit vertex points within certain ranges approach like in Black Desert. Which approach is Star Citizen going to use? Or has the crew come up with an even more diabolical approach that will knock our socks off?asked by Felicia FasterThanLight
TL;DRJared Huckaby and Chris Roberts say it will combine presets with adjustment tools, and also try blending features from different heads, made practical by the real-time rig technology.
I think it's definitely a combination of both like we talked about earlier so starting with kind of a preset and you choose your face, your skin colour, your eye colour, your hair colour. Then being able to mix and match from all those other combinations of heads that we've seen. So, it really is a little bit looking like Black Desert stuff, you can definitely change the tilt of your cheekbone, you can move it around and you can do stuff like that but it's not really actually bringing in other mesh or other character information.
Yeah, I think if I remember when I was playing with it, you sort of selected the face, hair and then you modify it and you have some really nice stuff for like the hair and altering the hair and moving some stuff around.
Yeah, they have some really cool stuff but it's not actually from what I can tell, it's not really drawing from fully another head, it's just kind of pushing and twisting and altering.
Yeah, I think one of the things that's kind of cool that we're going to try is we're going to give you those tools but we're also going to blend heads together so you can say, 'oh, I like that guy and I like that guy or I like this girl and I like this girl and let's merge her'. You know, maybe I'll take the jaw from here and the forehead from here…
Kind of that mix and match thing.
We'll blend them and blend there and that's one of the reasons why this live real time rig technology is very important because we can do all this stuff and it doesn't matter because it will all fall out of the sort of rig logic that gets calculated in real time. So, it inputs the animation, it doesn't need to care where the eye position exactly is, it doesn't care where the mouth is, it just needs to know that they're mouth was moving and the eyes were moving around and then the logic for the rig sort of does it's magic and goes through and changes it just on the appropriate rig. So, I think it's going to be pretty interesting, we'll see what happens.