Andreas · Principal Technical Artist, Tech Animation Team

I guess I'll take that one. Regarding body customization, it's simply a super hard problem to solve. It consists mainly of two problems that I think we can differentiate. One is body shape customization, so that's more about being able to blend between a skinny type and a heavy type and maybe a super, on-steroids bodybuilder type, these kinds of shapes. We could technically do this already with the way the DNA system works currently. The question is, what happens with the attachments? And for the head customization we've developed runtime wrap deformers, which can scale helmets, which can conform beards to changing face shapes in a way that keeps the art intact and keeps the art directors happy, no distortions and stuff like that. That works on the face. The same deformation tech applied to bodies would break in many cases. So while we can already morph the body shape, we cannot conform the attachments in a good way right now. So that's one of the two big problems we need to solve for that. And the other thing is regarding body height changes and limb length changes. This is another super hard thing to do because that affects all animations in the game. If you imagine a character holding a pistol or even holding a mug and moving that to his mouth to drink something: currently in the game, we have tens of thousands of animations that have been authored with so-called forward kinematics. Every bone in the skeleton defines its rotation over time, and that's how the arm moves towards the mouth, and then you get the impression that they drink something without spilling anything. Imagine we just scaled the length of the neck, for instance, or the length of the arm; your mug would end up somewhere else. So you need to retarget that animation at runtime, and while we already use inverse kinematics in many places, characters pushing buttons, reaching for things, there's a lot of procedural elements to our animation already, doing that for the entire body and for all animations requires massive changes to the animation backend. But yeah, we have all intentions to tackle those problems. Personally, I have some good ideas for how we can fix the first problem about the conforming of the attachments. And then we have smart animation programmers, Ivo, that I've been on stage with in 2018 in Austin. He's somebody that has the knowledge and the brains to fix that hard retargeting problem. But it's going to be a lot of work. But it'll be worth it because everybody having the same height is not great. But I think as a first step, we could, for instance, tackle just the shape changes, which would already give us some big gains.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Because we kind of already do it with the head, right? When we're in the DNA customizer and we make the head larger, in the game you're going to put a helmet on. Well, that helmet's not going to fit anymore. So the technical artists go in there and they mark up these assets to be able to deform based on the deformation of the DNA head. But then obviously that's quite limited here, limited movement. Introduce a whole body set, and it's a lot of data that you're going to have to mark up and stuff like that. So that's another one of the challenges. But I think the head was kind of the first step a little bit. And now we're moving into the difficult part, right?

Andreas · Principal Technical Artist, Tech Animation Team

Yeah, and body customization immediately has implications on gameplay. When you have a larger character, that's going to need a larger hit volume, right? I hope not all players will then shrink themselves. So maybe you want to balance that with, yeah, larger characters can run faster, carry more, stuff like that. But it will affect a lot of systems once it comes online. But one more thing I'd like to add regarding what the state of this is. So initially, our DNA system, which is the system that allows us to morph the heads and the faces and conform the attachments, was developed specifically for heads. That was around 2018, 2019. We've then used it on heads, and there have been systems that have been built around that system. So the code making use of that backend grew and grew and grew. So at some point, we already knew we wanted to tackle bodies. But we have a system that is very bespoke to faces. So I've worked for almost two years, not full time, but half time, on a refactor of that DNA system with the goal of getting it into a position where we can actually start tackling the body customization problem. So that was finished last year. And there are other priorities, like the gene pool head extension giving us 60 more heads, and the rigging pipeline that needs to be set up and the tools around that in order to even be able to create fully rigged, nicely animating heads. That also takes a lot of time. So yeah, it's a resource and priority issue.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it sounds like the 10-cent summary version of that is that different body shapes are something that we want to do, something that we're pursuing part-time on the side in between a whole bunch of other higher priorities and stuff. Nobody should expect it soon, but it's definitely something that is progressing, that we're still investigating, and something that we very much want to do.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

We want it, it's hard.