Will there be 'Barber shops' in game or places to alter our character's appearance for aesthetic purposes or in an expanded capacity a not so legal purpose?asked by BaconofWar

That sounds shady...

Yeah, not so legal purpose so is that like a?

Change your appearance so you can get away with a crime.

Yeah, right or is that like? I don't know...

I think there will be... We've been working a lot on hair recently, that's been a big topic because no matter how great your head scans look, you still need hair.

And that's our biggest problem right? The current hair that we had worked on and even some of the tech we're fighting with a bit is that's what's bringing, not down, lowering the quality, bringing down the heads a little bit. You take a look at the head, you take a look at the face texture and we've got the crazy winkles, we've got pore mapping, we've got all this crazy stuff and then you've got a current gen looking hairFS: Hair which has some alpha test on it.

Exactly.

With maybe some directional mapset. There's a lot of elements still missing right? You can get that nice rim lighting.

Right, right.

I'm sure we've all seen the Paragon demo where they have all the hair strands and stuff.

Well they've got this awesome spine stuff which looks just amazing, I love the look of that and we're always checking that stuff out.

You always want all this tech, but you still have to commit to where you're at and work with the tools you have.

RightFS: To get it done and further down the roadmap you can always try to stay on top of what everybody else is doing and keep to the same technical standards that the rest of the games have.

Yeah, right, and same visual standards really right? I mean we've gotta be one of the best games out there and we don't want to give you any old technologies kind've the thing and we don't want to make the faces we spent so long on look worse.

Yeah.

So the actual question is: Are there gonna be barbershops? That's a design question, I have no idea about barbershops. What I do know is that you'll be modifying your face in a medical facility of some sort.

Yeah like reconstructive surgery.

So whether you're doing your hair at the same time, that's a great question, probably?

I would say so.

I would guess.

I would imagine anything that has to do with the head in general.

With your face so facial hair or whatever else so I guess you have to get plastic surgery to shave.

MaybeST: Fair enough. I mean yeah, we are in LAFS: We'll see what... [Laughs]

Pretty normal. There's a lot of problems to solve with the hair like Forrest was saying. Even down to just having different head sizes. I mean all the heads are a different size so how do you stop yourself from making every single haircut for every single head.

So if I have one haircut made for one head, but obviously when you're customizing your character you're gonna want to have access to all the different hairs.

Pull all the different hairs.

But what if you chose NPC shaped head 9 as opposed to NPC shape 55.

Exactly.

Or even if you controlled it through a modifier or something or blend shape whatever we're gonna end up doing. How do you make sure that the hair stays attached to the head when the head changes size?

That's the thing and those are problems that we're solving and they give you an idea of that particular one. How we want to do this is that we have an actual scalp map, we hold all the morph targets for every single head within the scalp map, or we keep offsets of every single joint that we need to offset when we're customizing the face so we only make one model that contains all the morph targets for every single head and then the hair cards on top of that, those are going to have to move around.

And we've kind've started to play around with it. We realized very early, eyelashes for example right?

Oh that's a good oneFS: You make eyelashes and then you're like "Wait a minute, everyone has a slightly different size socket in the head", so how do you make... You can't just make.. We have 120 different heads, you can just make one set of eyelashes to fit all the eye shapes right so all of a sudden you have to figure out, that's where our technical animators come in.

Yeah the technical art team, we've got a really awesome technical art team and one of the things that our team is the best at and I say this and I'm super proud of the guys for being able to always do this is these massive script updates that will affect all the assets together. So one of the hardest things about this game is the sheer scope of it right? Like "How many heads we've got?" "We've got over 100 heads. "How many character bodies do we got?", we've got hundreds of these. You can't go in "manually open up my tweak one, close it, save, manually open up my, close it, save". It would take you all year, but we've got like Mark Mccall, John Rigs, Gauge, Matt Intrieri writing these scripts that are a batch process to it.So to give you an example, Mark Mccall made the eyelashes right? So one thing we don't get delivered eyelashes with the face is, it's a problem because they look pretty funny with eyelashes, especially females right? So what he's done is he actually has a script that builds the eyelash geometry. Not only does it build the eyelash geometry, but it checks the head that's it's working on, builds the geometry, skins it on, exports the process; puts it into a CDF and it's done.

Because that's how you manage it right because you want to have your artists spend your time on eyelashes because if you could have them spend time on one eyelash, they're gonna look really good. If they have to spend their time on 120 eyelashes, you're gonna have a very low quality set of eyelashes.

Right and you're gonna have an artist that wants to kill themselves by the end of it.

And we have this visual bar, yeah totally. So you want to have artists concentrate on single elements and then you have your technical artist populate those single elements in a very smart approach to save the labour time so we can concentrate on the visual fidelity and not the art labour.

The actual labour of it, Sure. This is where bugs come from. So to give you guys an idea, asset bugs, this is usually what happens. So you'll do a batch process like this, you have to spot check a whole bunch of them, maybe have QA check every single one of them, but you'll spot check a couple and then there'll be one that didn't one correctly or one that somebody's PC lagged out for a half a second or whatever, I mean this is where the asset bugs come from. It's not like somebody was sitting there, they looked at it, it's whatever the face is exploded and they're like "Yeah that's good" and they go an export it. It's usually something that somebody hasn't actually physically touched.

Yeah, yeah totally.

Cool.