Hairstyle Concerns for The New Races

[Vespar]

I assume that since the benchmark was delayed they may still be working on adapting older styles for these characters. Hrothgar however might be an odd exception. It is afterall our first real beast race.

[Chimeric]

I'm noticing the palette on the left that usually maps to the hair color is instead mapped to the accents, while the less saturated colors on the right seem to be mapped to the main hair color:



I'm a little worried that even if we do get the hairstyles implemented later or even at launch, we won't be able to recreate the same hair colors as Viera and the other races

[Duskane]

also a little upsetting there normal head hair cant have high lights Only there body fur

[Aeliott]

Gotta say I'm underwhelmed
I feel apart from fur colouring there isn't really much to diversify these guys. I know all races have very limited options, and Miqo'te especially have the same thing where most people tend towards the same one or two faces. But with hair being tied to face, I see the vast majority of people using the 2 upper right ones. The nose / jaw / facial features just don't really offer enough differentiation. Shame because I really like the rest of their design, torso not as doughy as Roes, the patches of hair on arms, legs and chest.

[JBee]

I was interested in trying out Hrothgar, but the restrictive hairstyles is a dealbreaker for me, personally. Hoping the hairs are not tied to faces at launch, but I suspect they will be, or else why put them in like this?

Oh well, no fantasia money from me I guess.

[reivaxe]

The viera could well be just unfinished due to how hair is chosen being an identical process to the current races. However for hrothgar it is definitely not. I feel like tying hair to faces is a strange decision considering you can buy hairstyles from the mog station, they're awarded for finishing content, they're prizes, etc. Being unable to use any of that hair would be a deal breaker for so many players.

Perhaps the hrothgar will be able to change their hair like everyone else in the 5.0 character creation...but this begs the question "why tie hairstyles to faces if this was not the intention in the first place?". Maybe it was a decision they decided to scrap. Or well at least I hope they will scrap it.

And also let me add how AWKWARD it is to choose hair for hrothgar. You have to constantly switch back and forth between faces and facial features to see all the variations of the hair.

I tend to try to take things at face value.

Viera have normal human faces unlike the HROTHGAR. They weren't gonna get glasses until HROTHGAR got them to.

In the benchmark Viera have only unique race hair like the HROTHGAR.. also like them they only have 8 hair styles and a version that adds a lil bit to it. ( Viera hair and Viera hair plus bangs is no different than HROTHGAR mane and mane plus a braid or side burns or w/e)

They were both described as having unique heads.

Seems clear to me that they are a packaged deal. If one expects one to get more hair it seems like the other would get more as well. So yeah, I'm kinda expecting both to release with only what they have or that plus mog station hairs and the contest reward styles.

Question is what's gonna happen with HROTHGAR when we meet the hair style man. Could see them allowing us to cchange everything but the race pretty much seeing how you gotta change face to change manes.

[Penthea]

They were both described as having unique heads.

I think in the viera's case it has much more to do with the ears than the head itself. SE did very little work on the au ra horns as far as hats are concerned. They just clip through everything. The position of the viera's ears makes doing this impossible because it frankly would look terrible with most head gear, and people would immediately draw the comparison between them and miqo ears, which work fine with hats due to ear holes.

The actual heads of the viera are not too different in shape to any of the existing races. The head is attached to the neck in more or less the same way as the current females and their posture is very upright. However this isn't the case for the hrothgar due to their hunched posture. Some of the longer hairstyles would clip like crazy into their backs. However their ears are small enough to fit into almost any hat.

So they both have problems the devs would need to overcome, but pretty different problems.

However, aside from time constraints, I don't see why the viera shouldn't have access to most of the current hairstyles. The ears are the only complication and it's basically a non issue for most of them. Making the hairstyles fit on their heads correctly wouldn't be much more work than it was to do so for au ra.

Seems clear to me that they are a packaged deal. If one expects one to get more hair it seems like the other would get more as well. So yeah, I'm kinda expecting both to release with only what they have or that plus mog station hairs and the contest reward styles.

Hrothgar is a very different story to viera. Though it's obvious a great deal of the current hairstyles could work on them, the fact that their current hair is right now being presented as locked with faces is making me concerned that we will be forever stuck with what we see now. If the hair wasn't tied to faces, I would mostly assuming that the rest of the hairstyles are merely delayed.

Question is what's gonna happen with HROTHGAR when we meet the hair style man. Could see them allowing us to cchange everything but the race pretty much seeing how you gotta change face to change manes.

While it would be nice to not have to fantasia to change hair, I don't think this would do much to ease the concerns of people who don't want to be stuck with such a tiny amount of choice and be forced to change their face just to change their hair. For years players have been asking for au ra horns to be separated from faces. Presenting hrothgar hair in that manner is a step backwards.

[Iscah]

Question is what's gonna happen with HROTHGAR when we meet the hair style man. Could see them allowing us to change everything but the race pretty much seeing how you gotta change face to change manes.

I'm not sure that they can control which categories are available for different races. I think it might just be that set categories of data can be changed, regardless of what that data is used for on the particular character model.

The best evidence for this is that changing eye colour requires a Fantasia, but Au Ra can adjust their limbal rings because that data is usually for racial tattoos (treated like face paint, I guess!) or earrings.


For reference, the normal categories that can be changed are:
- hairstyle
- hair colour
- tattoos / ear clasps / limbal rings (turn on/off and select colour)
- eyebrows
- lip colour
- other features
- face paint (design and colour)

And the remaining categories that can only be edited in the character creator:
- height
- bust size for females (no male equivalent)
- skin colour
- face
- jaw
- eye shape
- iris size
- eye colour
- nose
- mouth
- ear shape / tail shape
- ear size / tail length / muscle tone


I can't find the screenshot showing the list of customisation options for Hrothgar, but I gather that those first three options are fur pattern, fur colour and tattoos. Assuming it's consistent, there's nowhere to put an accessible "face/hairstyle" editable category. They've either used the face category, or quite possibly repurposed the tail shape category - Miqo'te have eight options and it's affected by the hair colour setting, plus it has the 'two rows of four options' layout while the faces (for Midlanders who have 5-6 options) are in three rows of two.

It's also possible that this is the real reason why Hrothgar can't wear hats - it's not that they ran out of time to model them, but that this repurposed design setup doesn't let them do it. There are essentially two (back-end) versions of normal hairstyles - the one we see normally and a "hat version" with some parts of the hair removed. It's possible that they can't store the same kind of variable model for Hrothgar, and so they functionally cannot wear hats without their mane clipping all through it.

[reivaxe]

I think in the viera's case it has much more to do with the ears than the head itself. SE did very little work on the au ra horns as far as hats are concerned. They just clip through everything. The position of the viera's ears makes doing this impossible because it frankly would look terrible with most head gear, and people would immediately draw the comparison between them and miqo ears, which work fine with hats due to ear holes.

The actual heads of the viera are not too different in shape to any of the existing races. The head is attached to the neck in more or less the same way as the current females and their posture is very upright. However this isn't the case for the hrothgar due to their hunched posture. Some of the longer hairstyles would clip like crazy into their backs. However their ears are small enough to fit into almost any hat.

So they both have problems the devs would need to overcome, but pretty different problems.

However, aside from time constraints, I don't see why the viera shouldn't have access to most of the current hairstyles. The ears are the only complication and it's basically a non issue for most of them. Making the hairstyles fit on their heads correctly wouldn't be much more work than it was to do so for au ra.



Hrothgar is a very different story to viera. Though it's obvious a great deal of the current hairstyles could work on them, the fact that their current hair is right now being presented as locked with faces is making me concerned that we will be forever stuck with what we see now. If the hair wasn't tied to faces, I would mostly assuming that the rest of the hairstyles are merely delayed.



While it would be nice to not have to fantasia to change hair, I don't think this would do much to ease the concerns of people who don't want to be stuck with such a tiny amount of choice and be forced to change their face just to change their hair. For years players have been asking for au ra horns to be separated from faces. Presenting hrothgar hair in that manner is a step backwards.

You're not really catching what I'm saying.

Its not a matter of how easy it would be or not, its the fact that through out all this they have treated the HROTHGAR and Viera as a packaged deal.

Like how they said the viera would not be able to wear head gear, not even glasses on the npcs. They didn't go "well, we can at least make glasses easily work on viera so lets let them have those in the mean time and not give HROTHGAR anything". Nope, they didn't seperate their options for that. .

For the hair I see no reason to not think its the same. As in, even if we think it's easy to just make the hair work for Viera I think its not gonna happen unless it happens for both. As it stands neither have the option for none racial hair and to give one all the shared hair styles the other would have to be given the same or something as well.

[Alleo]

You're not really catching what I'm saying.

Its not a matter of how easy it would be or not, its the fact that through out all this they have treated the HROTHGAR and Viera as a packaged deal.

Well I think the part with the headgear was because they still had to be changed for both races and since there is a huge amount of headgear they decided to do it later and do it together. The hair situation is imo different because unlike Hrothgar the Vieras still have their normal hair customization just less while the Hrothgar have none at all. So I dont see how they could not just say that thanks to their heads they wont get them but at least they got the fur. While Vieras got nothing else instead of more hair and at the same time have no visible reason to not have the other hair since their head is not different than other races.

If they really use the argument of a package deal for this then I will just shake my head and even as a fan of beastily races wonder if it wouldnt have been better to just get both Vieras..

In the end if we dont even get the other hairstyles for Viera than we have two big limited new races...which they then did not tell us beforehand..