Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.
In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.
Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.
So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.
Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.
As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.
Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.
Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.
Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.
The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.
Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.
I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.
Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.
I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.
Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.
We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.
For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.
There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.
Whoa! Hello there! Long time no postings!! This is the first post of our new blog? I think it’s a blog. Let’s just call it a blog. (Izzy right here is going to take the blame for writing atrociously).
Aaaaa anyway. Lets um take a look of where we’ve come so far. The game was started properly in around 2015, and has had a fun dev process.
Since I’m not a wordy person lets look at the before & after:
Magnet Implant Day 1
Part one in the story of putting a magnet in my hand
Picture: my hand about four hours after magnet implant in the left ring finger
After several years of umming and ahhing about body mods I’ve finally made the leap. I always thought it was very cool but wasn’t sure about getting one myself until I read a book this year on neurology. It covered many topics, but one of the biggest areas of interest to me was neuroplasticity - the brain’s ability to rewire itself to adapt to unexpected information such as damage or new sensory input. In the months following I found the back of my mind churning over possibilities and every now and again I found myself curiously researching the body hacking scene. I never took it too seriously - there was nowhere immediately obvious near me that could complete the procedure so I kept it as an idea and not much else.
When I returned to Melbourne after living in the UK for two years, I once again found myself absent-mindedly googling body mods. But this time, there was a high quality piercing place that did implants really not that far from where I was staying. I messaged them out of curiosity and very quickly one thing lead to the next and I’d booked an appointment.
I turned up at about 8pm at Piercing HQ in Abbotsford to have a consultation followed by the option to go ahead with the procedure. As expected from their site and social media, the store was professional, friendly and I felt right at home despite my social anxiety. After a mother and her three children finished up (perhaps their first ear piercings?), the piercer greeted me and talked to through the operation. It seemed simple enough - using a scalpel the piercer would cut a ~half cm hole in the left side of my left ring finger (I am right handed), creating a pocket in which the implant could sit. Then the small neodymium magnet, coated in medical grade silicone would be inserted. It’s placed to the side of the finger as to not cause excess pressure or damage to the bone if the finger ends up carrying weight.
I went ahead. The procedure was painful and felt incredibly strange, but very quick. In total, perhaps only 30 seconds from scalpel to complete. I didn’t watch - I’m not usually squimish, but somehow this was too much. My adrenaline pumped hard and I could feel my blood pressure drop at one point. So I focused on conversation about other clients and their implants. One man was particularly exciting, apparently with 5 RF chips in his body in various locations, so for different purposes integrated with his life (one for a work swipe card, one opened his front door, one even for pay pass). As a final proof, the piercer took off the end of the scalpel, placed it’s flat edge against my skin, and left it hanging, magically from my finger. “Now you know I definitely put a magnet in”. He said, or something along those lines anyway. He covered the (very little) aftercare required - fresh bandaids everyday for a week, and no party tricks for three. Pretty easy. He said he used to do stitches but the outer skin heals in a few days and stitches end up more hassle than not - bandaids have the same sealing effect for a cut so small, but also provide padding for the deeper healing around the magnet.
By the time I got home (after going out and getting some grub with a friend), the physical shock had worn off and my neurofen had kicked in; all I could feel was a dull throbbing pain and it certainly wasn’t enough to stop me from sleeping comfortably.
The Yara-Ma-Yha-Who is a legendary Australian Aboriginal creature, and a variation of the common vampire. The creature is described as appearing like a red-skinned little man with an oversized head, possessing a large mouth with no teeth. Adorning its hands and feet are suckers like that of an octopus. The little monster does not hunt, but rather waits in fig trees until unsuspecting travelers rest under its canopy in the shade. The Yara-Ma-Yha-Who then jumps down from its tree and drains the victim’s blood with its suckers, weakening their prey. It then consumes the person whole, and after consuming water and taking a nap, regurgitates the person, leaving him/her shorter than before and with a red tint to their skin. If the same passerby happens to fall victim to more than one of these creatures, eventually he/she may turn into one of them themselves. Unlike traditional vampires, the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who only “hunts” during the day, and supposedly one can survive an encounter by “playing dead” until sunset, as it only feeds on what it perceives to be living.
15th August 2018
Reblogged From kiwie-not-kiwi
Notes: 238
