As a way to recruit people to Star Citizen, have you though of bringing a facial capture rig/booth to the conventions, and letting people really flesh out the PU, and become a part of the game? Would that be more of a headache than it's worth in variety and publicity?asked by GeraldEvans

Yes.

I like this question because it's something we were talking about with one of our animators John Riggs since we were working on that facial capture system. The idea of setting up a booth like that, while cool at E3 or something, it's not something that's viable in the immediate future. It'd take a MASSIVE amount of work to translate that into the engine.

I mean, it's really an economical choice, do we really want to spend however many man-hours of modelling it'd take to individually make, what, a 1000 heads we shoot at E3? First we don't need that many, we make variants just by pushing around sliders, and secondly it'd probably take us until the NEXT E3 just to process them all.

What about scanning your own face to play your own character?

Yeah, that'd actually be... Well to get the fidelity you'd need to do it on one of our setups, and it'd take a lot of work for character artists to get them into the game anyway. I mean, look at the two British looking heads we did recently, one of our cinematics guys cleaned the models up really nicely, but that took a fair amount of time.

The TL;DR version is that it's not as easy as taking a few photos and converting them to 3D with a click, it really wouldn't work like that.