Can we have long hair below the shoulders and still be able to hide it while wearing a helmet, or is there some sort of technical limitation? Is there going to be consideration made for longer hairstyles to be fully displayed from underneath hats?

I can get that. So basically, as a game, we would have to limit the hair at some point. The limitation that we currently impose on ourselves was to do it up to the shoulders. And this is an agreement that we've done in order to minimize clipping and in order to function with all the things that the character needs to work with, of course. Now, it's not that we technically could not do the hair longer or that we could not simulate it longer or whatever, but at some point we would have to limit it. I mean, how long would it go? If we had it up to the shoulders or a bit past the shoulders, would you like it up to the waist? And if we do it to the waist, would you like it up to the feet? So at some point we would have to draw the line, and right now that's where the line is drawn, basically. And that's it for the size that we are achieving right now, that we want to deliver right now. Though, hat hairs and mask hairs right now, I think I can safely say this, that by 3.23, you're going to be able to basically choose a long hair, put a hat on, and the hair will just adapt to it. It's not actually an adaptation of the hair to it. It's actually replacing the asset. That's what we did. We created a specific asset for the hats and for the masks. So basically, to answer your question, yes, from 3.23 onwards, if you choose a long hair, you basically put on your mask or your hat, and you will see your hairstyle, not just something else. You see your hairstyle deformed to that specific hairstyle, and with physics and all. And so everything still works. It's just compressed by whatever the object is that's tightening you, basically.

Yeah, I saw this the other week and I was blown away. It looks so good.

Might be worth adding that even just the variation that Andre described kind of multiplies the number of assets that each department has to deal with. So Andre's department and Tech Art, maybe they start out with, I don't know, 30 hairs or 40 hairs. Then they need to conform them; let's say they groom them on what we call the male standard head. They need to conform that to the female head. That doubles the number of assets. Then they need to create the hat hair variants that, again, doubles that number of assets. And so you can imagine how that number would grow exponentially if we didn't apply very strict rule sets to where the hats are allowed to sit and where the volumes are, what the restrictions are. We have to limit those. Otherwise, it's an unbounded amount of work.

Yeah, Andreas, just to confirm what you're saying, basically each hair asset that we create, you can multiply it by four, or no, by more. It needs to go into the male, the female, the head hair... Because you have female head hair and male head hair, so each hairstyle just gets multiplied by a lot. This is what is actually taking a bit more time. We wanted to include this stuff. So we can create hairstyles really fast now, but now each hairstyle needs to just go with all this stuff in order to be implemented correctly and to deliver everything. Because we want you guys to use your hairstyle and then you put your hat on and suddenly you see your hairstyle with the hat, and you remove it and you get back to your hairstyle. So this is a very cool achievement that we just got.

Yeah, it is. It's amazing. I know the technical team worked with Andre and basically we have templates, and within those templates, it will represent a hat, and then the hair needs to be kind of adjusted based on these templates. But every time you have a new template for a new type of hat or whatever, that's an additional asset. So they could definitely stack up quite a bit. So kudos for supporting all of these variations of outfits. It's cool.