Marco: While developing Tomb Raider 2013 and after releasing the first screenshots and gameplay videos, many people complained about how Lara’s hair looked. The team greatly addressed this problem and implemented TressFX, in cooperation with AMD. This new technology was made available on PC and PS4/XB1 for Lara’s model in Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, the latter showcasing an even more polished version.
When did you feel the need to implement the TressFX? How far are you going to push this technology and improve Lara’s overall model? And how will dirt and water affect Lara’s hair?
Brian Horton: We definitely believe the hair technology we developed with AMD was a foundation for the way we believe hair will be rendered in the future video game graphics. And, as pioneers of this - there’s not many people to look at for reference other than films - we have been pushing that technology to find ways to make it even better. And we have been developing techniques to allow us to have more hair but less physics. The hair is now in clusters, so the way hair naturally falls is that hair wants to be next to a adjacent hairs that create shapes. Now, the hair splines can follow these guide hairs and these formerly physics-grown hairs, so it feels a little bit more natural when it moves. That’s one of the evolutions, and in water we now have the “zero-gravity” effect; so, when she goes underwater, her hair will float and it’s important - when it comes out of the water - it will feel heavier and feel more clumped and obviously look wet and darker, so all these things, including snow and the snow accumulated in the hair, that we’ve been incorporating into our technology.