Wouldn't it be nice to get some faces from your backers? Is that even possible? Can you tell us what is the hardest part of character creation and why?asked by Perry Hope
TL;DRScanning backers is possible in principle, perhaps with a reduced scan setup, but no decisions have been made, and doing it at the game's quality level would be difficult, especially with home-made scans.
We just talked about how… the process we go through or scanning so…
Pretty in depth scan.
It's pretty in depth. So, we definitely could scan some backers out there who would have to have a full rig setup. Right now we have the rig set up at Ealing Studio, takes awhile to set it up so we have to sort of, kind of semi permanent set up at Ealing so that's where we do all the Squadron 42 shooting and so when we bring an actor in, we shoot with them and also make sure we scan them. At the same time if we've got Foundry 42 crew people or people from over here in LA or people from Imaginarium and they want to appear in the game, we scan them too. So, not out of the realm of possibility to have a set up somewhere and a few lucky backers…
Bring some people in.
Could be scanned and we could put them in the game and there is a reduced sort of scan set up we do if you're not going to be up front doing lots of talking, more like sort of a background player in a movie, you know.
Kind of like an extra.
Yeah, an extra or something. Which is instead of 78 poses, I think it's something like 18 or 16 poses… I can't remember off the top of my head but it's a much reduced set up because we don't need to do quite as much because we don't build the full 400 blend shapes setup for them. So, there is… that could potentially happen although you know requires a lot of work to do it at the fidelity we're putting in this game because even our background characters have to stand up to…
Absolutely.
The quality that we do for our main characters so, you know, we've talked about it. Haven't made any decisions, we may do something like that for fun in the future. We've also looked at some standard kind of techniques you could do like you know for instance, you can take a webcam and look into it and go here and go here and probably map your face there.
Your face, yeah.
The question we would have is, is it going to look weird at that level and…
The question you run into with that self, you know, homemade iPhone or whatever photogrammetry is that the lighting condition and fidelity. So, we're just talking we want all our characters to be able to stand next to each other. So you should be able to stand next to as a player character next to Gary Oldman or any of the top tier characters and if your lighting is weird when you're taking your pictures, it's going to give us wrong information and the texture's might not be as good quality. It just creates the scenario where one can look worse than the other and that's not really what we want.
Yeah, we don't want to pull you out of the game because someone looks like they're shot with a really cheap camera.
Exactly.
Not great lighting and everyone else looks like a movie star. So, you know, I guess to be determined. It is possible but to do it at the level we would like would be difficult.