Greetings friends,

This week I want to show you some additional work we've been doing on characters. It is our goal to have a wide variety of bodies and faces in game for both players and NPCs. To that end, we've begun further explorations into how we can get more unusual faces, more varied body types, have better fat distribution, and provide different types of leanness.

First, I've got some new body type exploration, hot off the presses. Our existing character art was great and making different shapes and sizes of characters...provided they were fit! These 3D concepts are helping us set targets and constraints for characters that live a less intense lifestyle, so we can provide Elyria with better variety.

It's also extremely important - perhaps even more so - to support more faces! Fat faces, thin faces, androgynous faces, hooded eyes, big noses...we want 'em all! In particular, since characters can fluctuate in weight, further exploring what can change when moving between skinny and fat is helpful for us, hence the 3D concepts you see here. While our existing character model can move between gaunt to hefty, we're spending some additional time to see if there is more we can do to provide even greater variation!

Stay shiny!

Vye

Bonus/Belated Shiny:

We also like to play with new stuff when we can. Unreal 4.24 released some new, built-in hair sim and we figured it couldn't hurt to try it out. We're not sure if it'll replace our existing hair yet, but you don't know if you don't try! How do you think this compares to our existing hair?