[Character Graphics Update]: Second Benchmark Worries

[Absurdity]

From my understanding the new heads being able to morph into each other via shapekeys is a side effect of remaking the heads using the same base model and UV map rather than something that's actually being used in the end product.

I've seen this practice in other recent games as well. As for actual shapekey usage in this game, from what I've read about this it's either 0 or 1, unlike say visemes in Unity, so it's mostly used to have a certain shape applied for reasons such as overlapping gear. It's noticable with hairs especially because a lot of them drastically change shape rather than just get masked out.

I imagine faces are set up in a similar manner, whether they could turn these values into sliders is anyone's guess I suppose, but one would think if that was the case they would've done so already.

It might be a side effect, yes, but it still required them to remake all the shapekeys for the different faces. The current retail faces already use shapekeys but they do not use the same base mesh.

You are most likely correct about the shapekeys currently being binary though. The mouth for example has 3 different shapekeys, 1 for each option in the character creator with no active shapekey being the default mouth shape and 4th option.

The Height and Tail sliders scale the armature, and the Musculature slider overlays a normal map, which leaves the Bust slider as the only possibility for knowing if it's implemented already- I can see that being either bones again, or shapekeys.

At least right now all three, the height, tail length and bust size seem to all be done with bone scaling, the are no shapekeys on any of those meshes as far as one can see.