"CG_SBCrumb;c-2096238" wrote:
TOPIC: Art/Sound
Q: Something with GL Rey's face looks off, why is it so hard to capture female faces?
- A: CG_RagingSpaniard - This is a good chance to talk about process and to clear up a few misconceptions. Lets get into it
Female faces are challenging with low poly budgets. Even though we increased our poly count by double, our direct competitors literally use 3x the amount of polys our new models do. Your follow up would be "then why dont you do the same” and that comes down to a decision we made a long time ago to make sure that Galaxy of Heroes would be playable on a very wide variety of devices. The more we push into higher poly count, the more we exclude some Star Wars fans. It’s a delicate balance and we err towards letting more players play.
To give you a concrete SWGoH example, the WIP model for GL Rey that was shared in our State of the Galaxy reports is the exact same model and texture that was used in game, and the exact same model that was used in our promotional videos. I read a lot of comments along the lines of "why did they change the mode;" or "why didnt they use the one from the youtube video". We did - we had to lower the texture resolution in-game and we don't get the benefits of the fancy lighting and shaders you have at your disposal when making a promotional video, but it’s the same asset throughout, even for her unit icon. Same thing with the Cara Dune model used for promo materials this week. Same model and texture, but the texture is uncompressed and there's fancy shaders and lighting we can't replicate in-game.
Conventionally attractive female faces are hard to caricaturize, it's a typical challenge any artist faces. Daisy Ridley is a very beautiful woman and she comes with a very precise set of challenges when it comes to bring her into our art style because depending on the angle her face shape changes a fair amount, meaning that if you model her to look just like the reference from the front, her 3/4 view may look like a different person altogether, same with the profile view and so on. More unique looking faces like Adam Driver's or Oscar Isaac's are much easier to capture likeness wise because they are much easier to stylize and remain in-character, but it's not even a male to female comparison, Mark Hammill and Harrison Ford look like different people every time I see a photo of them, yet they remain recognizable - it’s a difficult challenge. To lead into the next question, Gina Carano, who is also a very beautiful woman, has particular facial traits that make it much easier to slightly exaggerate her features to make her more recognizable.
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I don't usually complain about your responses on these, but this is just not a good look, guys. "Women are hard because most look the same"? You really need to do better than that.
Capital Games Team
