Updated benchmark

[Cheapshot]

Edit to add.... because of this change this does in fact mean more hairstyles and hats for Viera and Hrothgar characters because they all have the same head base model as the other characters, but no, people are gonna complain over my chin isn't exactly identical as it was in the old graphics.

I actually don't think it necessarily means that? The hair and hats are still separate meshes that would all have to be adjusted to fit, just like before. They could maybe run a program to morph things but they're still gonna have to check each and every one and manually adjust just like before so no real change there. The heads are still roughly the same shape. Using a universal basemesh and shapekeys seems more of an effort to streamline new animation than for things like existing hats and hairs.

[azaleai]

I actually don't think it necessarily means that? The hair and hats are still separate meshes that would all have to be adjusted to fit, just like before. They could maybe run a program to morph things but they're still gonna have to check each and every one and manually adjust just like before so no real change there. The heads are still roughly the same shape. Using a universal basemesh and shapekeys seems more of an effort to streamline new animation than for things like existing hats and hairs.

Unless they're really streamlining/reworking the code surrounding the faces, I don't think they use the same base mesh and are shape-keyed to other faces in the game, but rather that's something they do when exporting the faces from their 3D modelling program to ensure the number of polys are uniform. It wouldn't make sense with how some races have human ears and some don't, wouldn't cover the horns or miqo/viera ears. And I don't really see them even unifying the mesh even between the same race unless they intend to give us all of the cusomisation options for each face on all of them, which... they haven't, as wonderful as that would be.

One thing along these lines they do appear to have done though, is while the faces models across the subraces were the same model (say Sea Wolves and Hellguard), the textures were different. That was how they got the Hellsguard to have the smudge, but the Sea Wolves didn't. Now, the smudge is actually a separate piece of the model that floats juuuust off of the nose like eyebrows and beards do, which is hidden on Sea Wolves and the textures appear to be completely shared.

They do some really neat things to lower file size! But unfortunately a unified head model isn't quite it.