Character heads as in the modeling of the heads? If so, I'm curious about how long the process takes to model an in-game render of someone's face?asked by Hearts

So I guess they're trying to qualify the question that we asked when we were soliciting these awhile back. For what we do we always, currently anyway, we don't model it just from scratch artistically. We scan a person, an actor, fully. We have a whole rig of 50 plus cameras that go around the head, and we, essentially use photogrammetry to digitize and take a 3D snapshot of both the geometry or the sort of 3D mesh of the head as well as what the face textures would be. Then we take that, and we do a lot to it after that. So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that.

Yeah after that we kind of… Especially for the some of the main actors who do full facial capture so they're getting blend shapes on specific ways that they talk. So that adds a whole another kind of layer. So that's a really difficult thing to do if you're just going to be sculpting a head from scratch, 'cause I think our characters have like some other upwards of 400 blend shapes.

Yep. Over 400 blend shapes.

So that would be 400 individual sculpts that we would need to make to match what we're doing. So that's really not an approach that we would want to be taking to get the realism that we want, especially for that actress that we have.

We work with a … there's a company called 3Lateral who are sort of quite well known for their headrig and head animation technology and sort of pushing forward the field of scanning live, real people and bringing them into the 3D world. We've been working with them for quite awhile. They've also in the past, you know they did Rise, for instance, back for CryoTech which is in the CryEngine, and our headrig, of the headrigs out there, is you know we'll talk to it in a bit, but the by far the highest fidelity …

Yep.

… headrig that they've done. I'm thinking it's probably higher fidelity or up there with anyone else's headrig, but you know so it's a big process. So if you go in and do a full set, an actor will set in this whole scanning set up and we will take 78 facial poses for them. So you know it's sort of like things kind of like you [Scrunches Nose] scrunch your nose, or [Raises Eyebrow] raise an eyebrow …

[Makes Faces]

… [Opens Mouth & Sticks Out Tongue] opens mouth. And you have to do that and each one takes about a minute to collect all the data from all the cameras, builds it on the computer, and you then take another one and you do it. So it can take anywhere depending on how quick or slow the person in the seat is, an hour to two hours to do the full 78 pose set, and that builds and that basically gets built down by a lot of the techniques that 3Lateral are doing to this sort of 300 pose, blendshape setup and then of course on top of the 400 pose blend shapes. I think about 440 actually for our higher tier characters. It also has bones underneath that like, I think it's something like 175 joints.

Yeah, and that also drives specific maps so when they are doing those specific faces, [Wrinkles Forehead] like the forehead, it drives wrinkle maps and animated diffused maps for our higher influence as well.

So it's not just blend shapes, …

Yeah.

… it's not just bones, it's a wrinkle map which is sort of telling the shader kind of what parts of the skin. So that's almost like …

Yeah. [Wrinkles Forehead]

… like a bump …

Like the wrinkle information you see here.

… yeah almost like it's a bump map and then the animated diffuse is sort of showing like how your color changes in your skin when you scrunch something up …

Yep. Maybe you'll get a red or a white. Yep.

… Maybe you'll get white or maybe you'll get red or whatever it will be. It's a pretty long process but after even doing that we bring it in and then we actually do sort of an artistic pass.

Yeah, kind of like a makeup polish, polish or a makeup pass in a way, 'cause a lot of when you see those actors getting scanned it's, you know. You usually have to scrub their face and so you can get these dots and you get really accurate information of what they look like, but that's also not what they would look like on the a film set, because they don't have makeup, and you know when you go and film sometimes. Most of the times you have like a very specific people that just do that. Right?

Yeah, you don't look like … you don't look like you woke up in the morning.

Exactly.

Everyone makes you up to look really great in a film …

Yeah.

… light you properly, and so when we actually scan the actors we don't want any makeup on them, because it's best for how they sort of build the 3D head.

Exactly.

So then we have this process that we bring, the head in and then we sort of do our own sort of makeup pass on the character and set it up in such a way that they're going to look like a movie star playing … running around in our 3D world. So that's part of our process. So we do all of this kind of assembling of the data that we scanned and then we bring it in here and do our own pass on top of it …

Yep.

… to sort of take it up to the extra level. We really work on things like the eyes, the tongue, the teeth.

Eyes. Yep.

And we still have a whole bunch of additional graphics work to be done. So the eye shader is going to get a lot more work.

The hair shader.

The hair shader is a big one, so that's our probably weakest point now. So a lot of the images you'll be seeing during this 10 For the Chairman, we don't have what our intended hair shader is going to be, but our hair shader is going to be to the level of the best hair shaders you've seen out there in real time games, and then we'll also work a little on the skin shader too. So, our goal is to sort of when the characters, you know when you play Squadron 42 for instance, the level of character tech and visual level will be as good or better than anything out there. So that's what we're shooting for. We're working really hard on it. We've got a lot of talented people working on it. We're not there yet, but I think you'll be seeing in this particular episode sort of some stuff along the way, and it's only just going to get better.