the viera and the hat

[Skivvy]

The mesh needs to be resized to fit each head and hair, then the textures need to be applied so that they don't look stretched. Then they need to put all that in game and test it to make sure nothing wonky is happening when the mesh meets the lighting engine and nothing is tearing at the seems depending upon the camera angle. If you've seen screenshots of some of the attempts to mod textures and meshes into various games - or hell just played modded Skyrim - you've probably come across instances where a giant black/various colored triangle just random appears for no discernible reason during gameplay. Play testing and making sure the mesh is rigged properly can catch this, but it's also why it isn't a 'wham bam thank you ma'am' change.

All this is a bit of work in and of itself but then you add onto it the sheer volume of hats this game has and it becomes a huge issue the art team didn't have the time for before the expansion dropped. Then when you take into account the very much needed break the team likely took after the expansion dropped - especially for the art team which was already in crunch but then decided to crunch /HARDER/ to give us even the head pieces we have in the game now for these two races, and it makes sense why we haven't heard about any updates till this point.

Perhaps this is a naive question, but they managed just fine with Au Ra, which I assume took some tweaking of meshes and textures. Why can't they do the same with Viera? A new race is obviously going to take effort, and at this point it just feels like Viera were incredibly rushed.

I could understand if they couldn't meet he Shb deadline, but now that we are past the launch, why cant they go back and start work on fitting all hairstyles and hats to the new races? I'm really struggling to understand this one.

[Ardox]

Perhaps this is a naive question, but they managed just fine with Au Ra, which I assume took some tweaking of meshes and textures. Why can't they do the same with Viera? A new race is obviously going to take effort, and at this point it just feels like Viera were incredibly rushed.

I could understand if they couldn't meet he Shb deadline, but now that we are past the launch, why cant they go back and start work on fitting all hairstyles and hats to the new races? I'm really struggling to understand this one.

Back then, they had only one race that had the same challenge (the ear-horns) and only the ARR and HW gear to fit. Also, the horns have all the same attach point, are immobile and have the same tapering profile near the head. With vieras and hrothgars, they have a lot more gear and two very different races to work with (even if functionally they are both "half" the job because of the missing gender). It's harder to explain why vieras are so difficult to complete regarding hair styles. It's easier for helms and hats tho. Ideally, the ears would poke from a place that make sense for each piece of gear and wouldn't have the ears move into the metal sheet of your helm (though, with how all the tails clip, I don't see this as a strong argument)..

I can understand the pre 71 gear not being designed around Viera and Hrothgar but post 71 (SHB gear) was just bad planning.

When they annouced them, they said that nothing would show (not even glasses, scarfs and the like). So yeah, they changed their mind at the very last moment ergo the bad planning

[Enla]

Perhaps this is a naive question, but they managed just fine with Au Ra, which I assume took some tweaking of meshes and textures. Why can't they do the same with Viera? A new race is obviously going to take effort, and at this point it just feels like Viera were incredibly rushed.

I could understand if they couldn't meet he Shb deadline, but now that we are past the launch, why cant they go back and start work on fitting all hairstyles and hats to the new races? I'm really struggling to understand this one.

Honestly speaking? I think they took on more than they could chew and just flat out ran out of time. During the fanfest when Hrothgar were unveiled it was revealed that the models had only /just/ been made presentation worthy the day before, and when the Viera were likewise showcased for the first time you'll noticed that each literally has almost the same exact face as the others with just slight variations. Given how different Viera face models actually are it seems odd that for the reveal trailer what we're shown is basically just one preset out of the four, unless the other three weren't even ready to be shown at that point. Now as to whether or not this was an upper management problem or a problem with the art team is unclear, but I very firmly believe that if they held the races back another few months most of these issues likely would have been fixed.