How does Spider-Man's hair get made? | Miles Morales

when it comes to video games i can't create myself that accurately and see if these i have an afro which is fantastic i haven't had one of those since college cyberpunk 2077 has some pretty good options but none of them feel like mine unless i'm playing an nba 2k game the bar for textured hair is pretty low until i played spider-man miles morales for the first time the game's got it all particle effects real-time reflections a mildly accurate version of manhattan and a sweet fade that actually looks good my boy miles will not be getting roasted on the subway anytime soon that is so cool but why have i never felt this way about video game hair before is it really that hard to give a character a shape up i spoke to some developers to get an answer that question and to figure out the process of creating video game hair some game studios create their hair in-house but many actually outsource it to smaller companies an npc's hair might take a couple of weeks to create for a main character like eloy from horizon zero dawn it could take a little bit more time let's ask the guy who'd know johann lithball it took me the better part of two years probably to create that one hairstyle that's wild right well you're about to learn why my friend before an artist can actually start creating hair they need to know what it's going to look like so they're giving concept art and reference images to base their designs off of a 2d image is a lot different than a moving 3d object so references are crucial to understanding exactly what the style should look like from every possible angle designers are also given a polygon budget which determines how detailed they'll actually be able to make the hair typically that number is somewhere between 5 000 and 60 000 polygons when we look at hair in a low poly game like valheim you really can detect individual strands of hair it just looks kind of flat their budget was between 60 and 300 polygons compare that to eloy's hair which had a budget of a hundred thousand polygons her hair can run my entire valenheim world eight times so it started off with alloy having some sort of dreadlocks i think and then along the process it changed into more like flowy hair and then turned a little bit more sort of vikings-esque uh type area with the twists up here and everything the design changed a lot throughout the process for sure johan's team wound up hiring a hairdresser and a model so that they could recreate the design on an actual person they then took that design into the computer and started working on it it took them a long time in part because eloy's hair is so complicated but their process wasn't all that different from the standard approach to making video game hair once the design and the polygon budget are nailed down an artist can begin actually creating the assets that usually starts with the volume sculpt phase the artist gets a bald headed model and needs to create the rough shape of the hair in 3d they're modeling things like how long the hair is the flow of the hairstyles where the hairline is and the location of the part this is just to get an idea of the overall shape the real work begins when they get to the textures textures can make or break a character's hair the average human head has about a hundred and twenty thousand hairs while banana has enough for all of us it would be very difficult though not impossible to generate each strand of hair separately so instead developers use something called hair cards which is pieces of digital geometry that have textures applied to them sort of like a lasagna wig with hair drawn all over it hair cards make it look like they're individual hairs but the game doesn't run like their individual hairs good textures are the key to making hair look realistic but they're not the only thing that matters i think that the way you layer the hair has a bigger impact than the texture that you apply to each individual hair card for sure you know i can create something that looks volumous and hair like using much fewer cards or polygons basically if i just make sure to layer them correctly ten years ago video game hair was just one layer on a character's scalp with the texture applied you can see it in the original mass effects hairstyles sort of like lego hair nowadays hairstyles consist of a series of hair cards that are layered facing outward and parallel to a character's scalp it's more like comparing legos to bionicles the same thing but more complicated hair artists take those layers and combine them into clumps or chunks the key is layering them in such a way that looks natural and not too uniform so when i kind of move around the camera around this set of planes i want it to not look like planes anymore i want it to look like a bunch of individual strands that are kind of going in a similar direction and then when i have that i combine it with other pieces of combined set of planes basically until i have a section of hair which i can then place on the scalp most hairstyles are made up of four different types of cards base hair cards structural hair cards break up hair cards and fly away hair cards base hair cards are the larger layers that cover the character's scalp the player won't really see these cards so it doesn't really matter too much what they look like structural hair cards are placed on top the hair on these is typically less dense than the hair on the base cards this is where the volume and style of the hair begin to take shape break up hair cards are added on top of those to define the haircut even more balancing out the structural cards and ensuring that the foundation is fully covered and finally flyaway cards are smaller clumps of hair that fly away from the head to break up the silhouette hair that's too perfect starts to look unrealistic so this adds a little bit of chaos back into the mix it is also important to remember that well-designed hair has to look good from every angle even the dopest style could look flat if it doesn't move right or react appropriately to lighting this is where specularity comes in specularity is the amount of shine reflected by your hair with light if you have dark hair like black hair and you look at it without specularity you're not going to be able to read any individual shapes so the eye your eye in real life is not going to be able to read it as hair but it's when specular is applied to it where you start reading those shapes and you your brain basically tells you like hey this is hair developers apply transparency to the hair textures which removes everything that's not hair strands then they add specular highlights to the surface of the strands to allow the game's lighting to bounce off the hair these are the basic building blocks of creating video game hair but each step varies depending on the type of hair especially when it comes to hair like mine so far we talked a lot about texture which developers use to make 3d objects seem more realistic but now we're going to be talking about hair texture which is about hair that curls and coils instead of being smooth when we described creating hair earlier it was relatively straight strands of hair textured hair has more detail and requires more data in order to be rendered correctly to make textured hair uh that has you know a lot of frizz in it or a lot of coil basically like any hair that has really really tiny shapes in it um you have to rely more on the texture instead of the polygons there are many ways for hair to be rendered one of those involves turning splines into textures in maya an artist can take two points and make a line this is called a spline unlike a polygon a spline has no surface and it can't be rendered unless it's converted into something else very straight hair can be made with just two points wavy hair with a few more when it comes to curls the spline has way more than two points then artists take those curled splines and apply them to hair cards curls just take more of the artist's time when creating them the illusion of digital hair breaks down without high enough textures this is why games like cyberpunk 2077 and skyrim seem a bit off the people who have textured hair an artist could add more high definition texture by adding more hair cards but that pushes the polygon budget to a higher value and requires more processing power you need way too many polygons to support that level of detail basically in each individual strand having the processing power of a lot of hair cards is relatively new which is why i was so surprised to see one of the best looking face i've ever seen in a spider-man game of all places having a sweet fade is a sign of maturity for people with textured hair it shows that you care about your appearance enough to pay a skilled barber to make you a unique silhouette to keep you from being clowned in your group chat so i talked to the team at insomniac about why miles's hair was so important to get right we wanted to give miles a more related player style and a great looking fade that you know better suited is his new role right with that hairstyle that is kind of a mix of like real world reference and what you see in the comments we'll start with the the cut reference of how it should actually look like the whole wig should look and then an individual strand reference so using uh high quality reference images of naji's hair to see how his hair actually behaves and try to replicate that when giving him cut and match the concept and the reference images that the gavin helped support game engines such as the unreal engine and the frostbite engine are rendering individual strains of hair and as technology keeps evolving there is an increased amount of polygons available for textured hair this is what insomnia gains has been working on with miles so miles actually has two fades he has his playstation 4 fade and his playstation 5 fade so the playstation 4 fade is actually a duplicate of the geometry of his skull that is pushed out a little bit and it uses a texture to essentially tell the renderer which pixels we want to render and which pixels we don't basically on ps4 mazda's hair is literally an extension of his skin that's been colored and textured to look like hair but the next gen version takes a next-gen approach on ps5 mazda's hair is composed of thousands of individually procedurally generated strands of geometry we do a number of techniques to you know automatically generate different levels of details and also duplicate or instance each individual strand so that we can um you know efficiently generate potentially millions of polygons as the view gets closer it gets more and more detailed further away it's less detailed and that's all done kind of procedurally at runtime the detail this technology of force for characters of color hasn't gone unnoticed one of the best reactions that i noticed on social media was you know kind of praising you know the ps5 for finally allowing us to get the black hair done right it's clear that creating textured hair like mine requires special consideration for hair artists in the past it required extra time and effort but now things are changing with technology improving there are fewer and fewer reasons for why gamers can't find the hair that they have in the games that they play it seems the only thing holding back a dope fade seems to be the company creating it hopefully we'll be getting more curls and natural hairstyles in the future but until then i'm still wishing for my sea of thieves character to actually get a haircut you know it's been quarantined and it's sort of just like it's all out there and he kind of needs a shape up and his beard is kind of messed up i know barbers are kind of expensive but it's just one of those things where you have to take care of yourself and sign up for maturity and something that you really should put into yourself and feel good about i don't know it's just something that you have to do

Channel: Polygon

Views: 109,649

Keywords: polygon, video games, videogames, spider man miles morales, spider man, miles morales, spider man hair, miles morales hair, miles morales haircut, miles morales haircut ps5, horizon zero dawn, horizon forbidden west, hair cards, polygons, how to make hair, video game hair, how to make video game hair, aloy hair, aloy horizon zero dawn hair, texture, textured hair, horizon zero west hair, horizon zero dawn gameplay, miles morales gameplay, miles morales graphics, playstation 5

Id: 1MWfWwiedOg

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021

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