How is the hair tech coming?

So the first step was really finalizing our proprietary hair tools so that the creation of these things is seamless start to finish for the artists here, as well as getting the hair shader to be able to do all sorts of different hair colors and look good. And it took some time. The good news is we got all that done. After we got it all done, one of our artists, our principal character artist in LA, James Koo, went and recorded tutorials of how to use the tool, how to make hair from start to finish, which has been super helpful to roll that out to other artists as well as some of our external vendors. So now everyone is up to speed on that. And the good news about that is it means our bandwidth to create hairs went up dramatically. And so that will only help us get more of these complete for Squadron, but also, again, more of those complete for what goes into the PU. So the short answer: we're in a very good spot with our hair tech.

I think it's one of the aspects that kind of gets undersold a little bit: it's one thing to make a new tool, which is awesome. We showcase the tools that our developers make to help other developers all the time. We just did with the terrain modification tool on ISC yesterday. But there's another step that happens after that. We have to train people. When you develop a brand new tool, that takes a fair amount of time itself, but then you can't just hand the tool to a bunch of people in different studios and be like, use it, it works. They have to learn it and they have to bring their own individual skill with that tool up. I imagine as wonderful as the tool is, the first couple things that somebody who's never used it makes won't quite be at the quality that we're looking for. So even talented artists need time to work with it and develop their own skill set with it and get better, so that we have more than one or two people that can make things at the quality level that we're looking for.

Can I talk about the hair tool a little bit? So two years ago, when we showed the most recent Squadron trailer, the one where we show Henry Cavill at the very end: when we did that trailer, that was pretty much the beginning of when we were starting the next-gen hair. And we used XGen to try to get that realistic hair feel. And it looked real. The problem was that hair poly count was like, I think, two mil, six mil at one point on some characters. It worked for a time, but we're like, okay, we need to fill the screen with 100, 200 characters. And so we're like, how can we get this to look as close to actual realistic hair, but then still be playable in the game? Because we don't want what some games do, where they might have the main character and that character has hair and everyone else is bald. We can't have that, right? So we tried to come up with a bunch of techniques, and that went through a lot of different artists. We also had a lot of people who were trained at other companies as well. James Koo did a lot of VFX stuff for TV shows and also for film as well. So he brought his knowledge as well. And so we were trying to make this hair tool that works for Star Citizen, where we get that realistic looking hair, but then still efficient and cheap enough for us to run the game at a normal FPS. And so that process took a while. And then we made the gold standard hair for our character Kelly, which you guys have seen before. And that was our first gold standard hair. Then the second one, for the male, was pretty much Captain White. And then the next point was, okay, can we change the colors of the hair? And we tried changing the colors. We got to the blonde. The blonde looked super fake. So we were going back to the shader, going back to the tools guys. And we were just doing this back and forth. We flew Nico and Rob Dickerson out here multiple times. It was a character artist and the two of them; they were in this room in the corner of the old studio and they were just cramming every single day. I remember Nico had his head in his hands. He's like, I don't know. But we finally got it there through a lot of hard work and dedication. And the hair, I wish we could show you, but I don't want to spoil anything. When it's in your hands, I want the players to be like, oh my god, the hair looks great. And the hair looks absolutely phenomenal. And when Chance and I look at the hair in the PU, we just kind of shudder now when we look at it. But once we get a list of hairs, especially for Squadron 42, that's got to look really good, we can easily port that over to the PU. And that is the plan. And also, I saw some of the Spectrum questions were like dreads, cornrows, curly hair. Those are the type of stuff that we would like to do down the line. But we have the tools and the training. Because I think when we first finished the hair pipeline, two, three artists knew how to do it. And then the other 15 were like, what about us? And so we spent a good six to seven months training a majority of the character team. And we've gotten some new hires recently as well, and we give them some ramp-up time to teach them that. So the setup was long, but it's super worth it. And I'm super excited. I can't wait for the players to get it.

It's been said before, but because Squadron 42 is the priority of so much, especially on the character team, and because Squadron 42 is in the heart of the military, a lot of the hairstyles are very conservative. It creates an unfortunate but necessary bottleneck for this. We've got to focus on that stuff first, but I don't think there's anybody on the character team, if I'm allowed to speak for your team, just from who I've spoken to, who isn't super chomping at the bit to get as many varied and interesting hairstyles into the game as possible.