f13.net

Comment is a couple of months old, but I missed it..  Link (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/02/cliff-bleszinski-explains-why-there-are-so-many-bald-space-marin/)

Cliff "Young Clifford" Bleszinski wants you to blame the tech. Speaking with Develop recently, the man that birthed Marcus Fenix said, "The technology of this generation just happens to be very good at rendering metals and stones and dramatic lighting." He argues that "translucent effects" are much harder to pull of with the technology given and as such, "the tech is good at showing off armor and it's not that good at doing hair ... that's why we have bald space marines."


I call bullshit! It can be done. Give these girls a big gun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--lkaMayDNM).

Yea, but the hair looks metallic :-)

Green, right? right?

I'd play Unreal Idolmaster Tournament 2004.

Green haired loli in a cop outfit maybe. :why_so_serious:

Well played. :pedobear:

I would think the geometry and animation issue is the bigger problem at the moment with rendering more realistic looking hair in video games than translucency. In many games hair looks like Play-Doh stuck on people's heads because it's not attached the head in a realistic manner (it looks like the worst possible toupee) and either the hair doesn't move at all or only bits of it do (like a bouncing pony tail). There are also shader/texture/lighting (not related to translucency) issues where hair ends up looking like plastic. Games that aren't going for a realistic look (i.e. are more cartoon looking) aren't as susceptible to this latter problem since a uniformity in shading of textures is not unexpected while it is in games that try and look more like the real world.

Translucency and shadowing of individual hair strands is important for rendering realistic hair, especially for lighter colored hair, but we're not at the point yet where your video game character has enough of his or her hair strands modeled and animated where those things even matter.

Any attempt to do hair in this way would utterly fucking wreck current graphics hardware.

Meh, google search for Ren's Hair for Oblivion.

Decent hair is well within the bounds of modern systems, just not modern developer cost models laziness apparently.

No, its just do we have golden locks of hair flowing in the wind, or the 50 other features that could use that processing power.

You pick.

As you can see, Ren is not the messiah. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSMp-CmjG5Q) looks good, but it has the same issues as any other, that's why they dont put in long hair, looks like ass with out some kind of simulation or physics.

Cloth physics can be modified to get close.. but again, its all give and take.

No.  There is absolutely no need for plastic hair.

In the original example given there is no reason the space marines can't have military buzz-cuts that don't look like shit.

Animation budget is something else entirely.

Fixed that for him.

I remember you making the exact same point previously.

Batman: AA uses the Unreal Engine 3.5 and the only dynamic hair in the game belongs to Poison Ivy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWLvWHf-Z4).

UE is pretty notorious for having shitty hair.

Canned animation with a UV or surface shader for motion/displacement on the surface of the hair. AKA: Not dynamic.

I'm willing to overlook so-so hair, like what you'll see in Oblivion, Fallout, and Mass Effect; stuff where the hair looks okay but doesn't ever budge.  I'd rather have unnaturally immobile hair than deal with more bald/hood-wearing people.  What I'm less-willing to put up with is crap like EQ2's hair, where on top of being immobile, it's done up in bizarre spikes and curls and shit, which make it impossible to ignore how fake it is.

My definition of dynamic was 'it moves'. I accept it wasn't technically the right term in this case.

Looking at Batman:AA, the vast majority of opponents are bald. It must be a dress requirement for working in the Joker's gang.

You'll also notice another feature of the Unreal Engine: Touching your ear and walking slowly when getting comm messages.

I laughed.

Oh, I was just saying what you are seeing isn't dynamic, just a really good fake using a number of techniques.

(I dont like using the word fake in this way, but I can't think of a better one, most "fakes" are "Intelligent uses of resources to approximate the simulations with out compromising performance, integrity or visuals". So, I do not mean "fake" in a derogatory way)