Character hair: what are the possibilities of using something like TressFX or the new AMD technology PureHair? What's our plan for hair?

So I don't know too much about PureHair. I know that they've released an update to TressFX, and we evaluated TressFX. And here's a little bit of history again: when TressFX 1.0 rolled out, I was part of the Crytek team that did the implementation originally for TressFX into CryEngine. So basically AMD had come over with all their work on Tomb Raider, and we had done a tech demo called the Ruby tech demo. You can look it up. This is something I worked on with IllFonic, actually. Now, not to at all speak badly about the tech. It's very, very cool stuff. However, we've got so many characters on screen, and for us to go with just one character having ridiculously granular simulated hair, and then everybody else in the scene kind of having crappy, poly-soup kind of hair, doesn't really make a ton of sense to us. The other thing that is a worry, of course, is just the performance implications. So in all the games that have used TressFX, and again, I'm not saying it's a badly performing system, but it is not a system for 40 characters on screen. It's not a system for 60 characters on screen. It's really a system for the fur of a hero character. It's really a system for the hair of a hero character. And again, in something like Tomb Raider, there's pretty much one character on screen. You may have enemies and stuff like this, but generally you are only looking at one person. Do we need super advanced level hair simulation? I would argue probably not. I would say that there's things that we can do now with the item ports and these, we call them skeleton extensions, with pretty advanced rigging, that will make it a lot easier for us to do a lot of hairstyles without having to resort to a GPU hair or a TressFX or, I think, NVIDIA HairWorks or stuff like this. So I can't say no for sure, but we have evaluated what was there, and it just wasn't suitable for what we wanted.

And the real trick with those hair systems, and it's just from past projects having worked with them, is getting the hairstyle you really want. It works real good for long flowy hair that's real straight, or even a ponytail or something tied back. But as soon as you want some sort of real retro cut or something that looks very unique, it gets tricky. It really does. And the other thing that we have to consider is the zero gravity of all of this. So TressFX deals with that, but it looks a little weird, if I'm totally honest. How it ends up simulating is not what you would really expect. So that really matters to us. With all that said, we are going to have hair. We do have hair on the characters right now.

And there's one little other limitation in this, and that's the character customization. Because we want to have characters customize not only their hair color, maybe the style, maybe the length. There's a really great Korean MMO out right now. They just released their character creator, which is one of the best out there. And not to plug them or anything like that, I have zero involvement in it whatsoever, I'm just very impressed with the level of customization that they brought it to. It is called Black Desert. In terms of hair customization, I've never seen a better system. Could you do that with TressFX? Sure, it's shiny hair, but look at all the stuff you can do to it. You've got control points, you can pull out the hair, you can make it longer, shorter, you can crimp it, you can do all these things with it. And it's hilarious me talking about hair, because I've got very little of it, and my expertise in hair is pretty limited. But we want the characters to be able to customize it. And again, there's so many settings on the TressFX hair that we would have to then persist and serialize. It's probably just too much.

It's important, because all these systems won't exist in a vacuum. It has to be how they will integrate with everything else that we're doing.

Yeah, and that is the classic tech director role, that we've got to make sure it works with kind of everything. And you can be the buzzkill, unfortunately, and you're a bit of a killjoy sometimes, where it's like, ah, this would be an amazing feature in this one little situation. But okay, what's it do here? What's it do here? What's it do here?