This week’s Star Citizen 10 for the Chairman is being called a special edition in that Chris Roberts and Head of the Global Character Pipeline Josh Herman selected questions from the players based on the topic they wanted to discuss, but when you see the video, you’ll understand why. It’s all about heads and faces, and the episode includes several minutes’ worth of footage of how those faces are coming together (spoiler: They’re coming together in extraordinary detail).
“I think we have over about 160 heads or so already scanned and are in various process of being brought to final quality and we have a plan to modulate and let you change and build your own player head that’s not a preset one,” says Roberts. “[W]e don’t model it just from scratch artistically. We scan a person, an actor, fully. We have a whole rig of 50 plus cameras that go around the head, and we, essentially use photogrammetry to digitize and take a 3D snapshot of both the geometry or the sort of 3D mesh of the head as well as what the face textures would be. Then we take that, and we do a lot to it after that.”
Even if you’ve no interest in Star Citizen, it’s worth a watch to see what kind of insane character design can be concocted from a huge pile of money and talent.
