What are the plans for long hair and helmets? Are you guys working on long hair tech?

Yes, but first we have to, okay, so hair. Let's talk hair. Okay, hair is hard. Hair is really hard. And not just hard for me. It's hard in real-time rendering. Hair is very difficult. And to be fair, nobody's really solved it in a new or unique way for the last, let's say, 10 years. It all uses alpha cards, and whether you use alpha test or alpha blend, there's pluses or minuses to the whole thing. So the difference between alpha blend and alpha test: you have a card, you have an alpha channel that's basically saying this is transparent here, not transparent here. Alpha test only does a singular test of that. And it says, basically, is this vertex going to render or not? Is this pixel here or not? And it does one check, and it goes through, or it doesn't go through. Alpha blend does multiple. It actually blends it rather than doing just a test against the singular pixel. When you do alpha blend on a bunch of the hair cards, the softness of the hair can look amazing. The problem is performance changes depending on the distance that you are, so how much of the screen space alpha blend actually takes up. So it's a bit of a rendering thing. So we showed at CitizenCon pretty much an update to not only the hair shader, but the method that we make the hair. So this has not at all been applied to the current character creator. So that's step one, is take those hairstyles that are there now and make sure that they're using the updated shader and the updated pipeline so that they're all going to look a lot better.

We also had to update it to unify them so that we could have them on all of our different head shapes and all of our different characters.

And make the attachment system work for that. So they use that elastic sort of technique. The trick is getting it simulating on top of that. So once we've got the visuals where we want it, then we'll get into the simulation side of it. And that has to do with the complexity of these attachments. So now think of how this works. We have this hair, and we have an adaptable face, and we have this runtime deformer that contorts the hair to fit. And it's not just a uniform scale thing. We can move the scalps. We can move all of the areas of the head, so the hair has to move up and down. And now add joint chains into that, because generally you're going to want to simulate these things with either joint chains or some sort of cloth vertex simulation. Or you go crazy and you go TressFX, NVIDIA hair. But all those systems use some form of vertex simulation to some degree piped down onto the GPU. So whether we want to implement that, that's probably a bit further than we'll go. But on the joint chain technique, we need to be able to update the offsets of those joint chains so that the simulation happens from the right place all the time, depending on the attachment changing. And the constraints.

Actually, I have a question for you. The blending that we're doing on these attachments that hair is a part of, are we able to do that in multiple steps, or is it just the one step? Like, my head is this shape so my hair has to attach to that, but if I put on a beanie or whatever, are we able to then also clamp it on the secondary step, or is that problematic?

That's a bit problematic, and I know what you're saying. So what we do instead, we do subgeometries. So that's basically different forms of that geometry depending on what the attachment is. A great example of this is the current Snoopy cap. And we finally fixed this thing. Well, kind of. It's coming back. So everybody's seen it, I'm sure. You've got Mohawks sticking through helmets. Now that we have long hair, it's more like the rule than it was before. It used to just be the exception. The one hair, the Mohawk, would always go through the helmet. We had set up a bunch of logic, but there was a code bug within here that the tag wasn't being respected. So basically what we do with this Snoopy cap: if your hair is so long that it would clip through the helmet, we instead put a Snoopy cap on the hair, but that's all adapted based on what hair you have. So when the helmet comes on, just to go to your point of putting on a beanie and changing it, we do this with the Snoopy cap. So when the helmet goes on, if the hair is so long that it would clip, we put the Snoopy cap on you.

But because of the way we do that with the subgeo change, we don't necessarily have to pick the same Snoopy cap for every hair. We can have that hair sticking out the bottom of it or whatever else.

And that's all just asset work. And generally, with the character team, I talk to Corey a lot about what he calls hat hair. So it's basically, when you put a helmet on, what's your hair look like? When you put a hat on, what's your hair look like? And it's just how many of those they actually want to make. For every single hairstyle, if you now have to make a hat hair version, a helmet hair version, that's already multiplied it by two, or three anyways, the three different forms of each hairstyle. And you just don't want to make so much complexity for them.

What I'm imagining is Pacheco's hair, but then you put a hat on top of it, but the dreads are still low.

Yeah, but again, what's that look like in a helmet? Because if you've got dreads, okay, cool, you put on a helmet and you've got dreads hanging down here. What's that look like in a helmet? Actually, what would that look like? It'd be really weird. You'd have this bunched up stuff in your helmet. So I realize I'm hand-waving, and put the Snoopy cap on and that volume of hair just kind of goes away. I don't know if you could fit that into a Snoopy cap. So, yeah, I guess short answer is yes.