There’s a quip in an old Tim Rogers video about Hitman 2, where Agent 47 is bald because “it’s 2018 and they still can’t get hair right”.
It’s a classic joke about video games. Video games can simulate complex interlocking networks and systems, calculate the movement of thousands of individuals all at once, model weather patterns and general entire galaxies on the fly, but hair? That’s a step too far.
Despite seeming like a natural extension of character models — which have made extraordinary strides over the past console generation — hair has always been especially challenging. Add problems with older rendering technology and weaknesses in things like subsurface light scattering and how different skin tones react to different lighting conditions, and you’ve got a whole host of problems stopping characters looking authentic the way they should.
It’s…
