Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yeah, it already works. We even showed it in the CitizenCon demonstration with Ivo and Andreas. We showed it specifically on Captain White's beard. The tricky part is we just don't have many beards right now. That's all. It's just content. What was so interesting about the whole deformer thing too is what I expected to be the hardest in making these runtime attachment deformers actually ended up being the easiest, and the stuff I thought was going to be the easiest ended up being the hardest. The helmets I thought were going to be the easy one where we just kind of scale them, whatever. That was way harder than I thought. But the beards and hair, typically things that touch the face are super hard to deal with just because you've got blend shapes in there. You've got all kinds of stuff going on that you can't just skin to because you've got different topology. But the elastic deformers, the same ones we use for the hair, are actually the simplest ones for us to make. So what it means is that every single vert that moves around will move that same attachment as he speaks and everything. So we get much, much better results even with this attachment stuff than we had ever before, because it was just skinning. And actually, even though you might not have noticed, even in the early Squadron sort of videos and vertical slice stuff, blend shapes would clip through the beard and stuff like this. You kind of didn't notice because we tried to hide it a little bit. But this system works so much better for that. So making beards is actually much, much easier than it ever was before. What's also nice about that is there's other things like beards that go across your face. So if you can think of a bandana type thing around your face, that totally works and you can see the speaking happening below it, which is just incredible to me. That's not an easy thing to pull off. A doctor's mask is another one that I like to see, which is the exact same thing. I showed that in the internal demo, that it all moves around. And what's cool about a doctor's mask, too, is it's got these sort of loops that go back around the ears. And because of the way the deformers work, as the ears move around, that whole stretch stuff moves around. So it just makes having the singular asset, mark it up one time, and it works for everybody.