Dragon Age: The Veilguard has introduced some striking visual changes to the world of Thedas, and while the new art style has been met with mixed reception, there’s one aspect of the game’s aesthetic that most players seem to agree on: The hair looks really, really good.
EA and BioWare appear to share the sentiment, and have revealed the recipe for high-quality hair animations via a new blog post that examines every individual strand of The Veilguard’s glorious collective locks. According to the post, each of the game’s hairstyles–of which there are over 100–contain 50,000 individually rendered strands of hair. EA and BioWare credit the Frostbite engine for the high-quality results.
Frostbite has been working on realistic hair tech for a while now, but the engine’s progress truly shines in Veilguard, and it’s not simply due to the number of hairstyle options or the amount of hairs on each character’s head–length plays a major role, too. The Veilguard features a number of waist-length hair options (curly or straight) that move in combat, realistically responding to momentum, wind, blasts of magic, changes in direction, and other variables. But getting there wasn’t easy.