Will the faces we see on our characters, other players, and regular NPC's be the fidelity we saw on the character in "Pupil to Planet" (Or better), or more simple like the characters in the Morrow Tour video?asked by L’Mac

Okay so forget the Morrow Tour, that was a whole combination of things, bad lightning, broken shaders, quick assets that hadn't gotten through any of our pipeline. So you'd be interested to know the character in Pupil to Planet to a character called Joaquim Steiger in Squadron 42 scan of the actor.

What you saw in Pupil to Planet was an untouched up head and that was a Tier two character. Our rating is at top is tier zero, so that is what we used for Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong, they're all tier zero. Then tier one is the next level so actually the actor Steven Bustling who's playing Marrow is a tier one head and then the next one down is a tier two which is what Joaquim Steiger, and then we have a tier three head and that's basically our ratings, but all of our heads have pretty much similar fidelity and they all have to stand up next to head other because you could be standing in a conversation with a tier zero, a tier one and a tier two and really the big difference between the tier one and the tier one's and the two's is the tier zero just has more facial density in the mesh. So for instance we use 40,000 polygons when you're up close to a tier zero. Where as a tier one, tier two, and tier three are about 10,000.

Yeah, Much less.

Much less, but 10,000 up until now, the top level of triple AAA, up close, cinematic head character.

Even our bottom level is the top level of most other games.

You'd have to look close to see really that much difference. So we do it for the Gary Oldman and the Mark Hamill's of the world because we really want to capture every single nuance of their face when their performing and talking in motion and so in those ones for the main characters you're right up close to them and you want have some emotion to it, we're just going for a little more fidelity in the character, but you know a tier zero and a tier one almost have the same number of blend shapes, almost the same number of bones, and so outside the mesh itself having just more density of faces, it's pretty much the same and so the difference is really just… the wrinkle maps also give you a lot of detail, but maybe just a kind of little detail.

A little bit of subtle bits in the animation I think is going to be some of it. The texture sizes are all the same between all the heads so that particularly doesn't change much. Certain characters like you mention, Mark Strong has a very specific way that he speaks. So he kind of like me speaks out of mostly one side of his mouth so you really want to capture that, right? And that's because he's a Tier 0 so you really want to get that across.

Yup so like I said, no Morrow's Tour, that's the past. We've moved on and done quite a lot and you can see in this video some of the differences for what it is and like we were talking earlier, there's going to be a fair amount of improvement even from here in terms of what we're doing with the shaders. So it's generally the way it works in development is you think something looks good and then next year it looks better and the year after it looks better, you can just look at the Hornet or the Bengal carrier that we had when I launched the 2012 crowdfunding campaign and I thought that was awesome and I think a lot of other people did, but every year I see stuff moving even now, if you've just seen the video with Chris Smith's new Hornet or the stuff that Nate was showing with the Bengal, it's like a whole another level.

Totally yeah.

And that's kind of where we're pushing on the heads, but yeah what we want to do is we want you to feel like you're in say Squadron 42 or even in the PU, having a conversation, interacting with NPCs and the quality of the character animation, the facial animation is what previously you would have experienced in a pre-rendered cinematic and so that is a goal to really try and put you in the story so to speak.

So that's what we're shooting for, I think we're going to get there, but it's definitely taking a lot of hard work. A lot of good people doing it like Josh here and his character team, we have a whole facial animation team over in the U.K. and a whole really talented cinematics team in Germany.