Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.Ĭlaire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair -think many characters in Uncharted 4. Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine-think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. We started by investigating what other developers have done. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.Īs a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.īuilding Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team.
I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me. In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons.
Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods.
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