[Mack]

Original Source: https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/st...etail/11073633

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We’re making some changes to the character art in STO, which you might notice in our upcoming Mirror of Discovery update. We spoke with Robert Quinn, one of the FX Artists for STO, about the details of these changes.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for STO

My name is Robert and I am one of the FX artists on STO. However, I do a bit of technical art and shader work on the side.

What are the changes we’ve made to player characters for this update?

Our graphics team made a new shader for soft alpha that does not use Multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA). MSAA is very computationally expensive and it does not work on low-end PCs or consoles. This made the Hair in STO look bad on low-end PCs or consoles. I updated all of the hair in STO to use the new soft alpha without MSAA. The result of this is that all the hair will now look the same on all platforms and will have better performance.



How did you go about making these changes?

While I was updating all the old hair shaders in STO I spent a little extra time to make the hair look better. I added anisotropic specular and made the hair color affect the specular color. I also adjusted how the fresnel and light bleed affected the hair color. This should make the hair look softer and more natural. After I finished the hair I updated the skin shader to make the characters look more alive. For this, I just added a bit of inverted fresnel to fake some subsurface scatter.

What’s the process like of improving the graphics of a game like STO?

The process is very different when you are making improvements on a game that has been live for several years rather than building something from the ground up. I did not want to break all the old hair in the game so I ended up having to preserve all the old inputs and textures of the old hair shader. I had to figure out how I could work around what was already in the game and add in the new functions I needed without breaking anything. This tends to be much harder than building it from the ground up. We are still looking into more ways we can improve the visual quality of the game and this just one step on our journey.

Can you show us some examples of the changes?

Below are some examples of the old hair and the new hair.



So there you have it. Enjoy your new looks, Captains!

[Silynn]

I'm very happy about this. Reduces the "Barbie and Ken" hair look (i.e. plastic). This gives me hope that the old uniform textures (like the First Contact uniforms) will get updated as well.

P.S. I *expect* everyone not sporting the clean look (like Mack) to submit Signature updates to remove their Barbie/Ken plastic hair... once this is implemented.

[Scarlett]

P.S. I *expect* everyone not sporting the clean look (like Mack) to submit Signature updates to remove their Barbie/Ken plastic hair... once this is implemented.

YAAASSS!

[Arlu3n]

P.S. I *expect* everyone not sporting the clean look (like Mack) to submit Signature updates to remove their Barbie/Ken plastic hair... once this is implemented.

This. Totally agree

[Blaster]

Seems good. Although I cant tell the difference except the hair colour is ah, brighter.

[Infinity]

Well this is certainly a nice improvement.

[Deleted]

Hopefully they'll do it right this time, I've always hated how the general assumption today is that brighter and more reflective equals better graphics, it does not... Hopefully this will resolve that.

[Arlu3n]

Seems good. Although I cant tell the difference except the hair colour is ah, brighter.

Look in the first comparison picture at the bottom parts of the hair.

[Silynn]

THANK GOD! Finally the greasy hair is gone. It really annoyed me that even after sliding the shine to zero it kept adding shine to it. Now darker hair colour can actually be dark.

Totally. I always had to go with a medium dark to avoid that look.

But more so, I'm *very* much looking forward to a possible fix of those ugly missing textured hair strains. If you zoom in on a very high resolution image, strands of hair actually are missing (side burns on my avatar or in SammyGM's the hair strand on his forehead). I actually go in and do touch-ups on these to fix.

Very excited to see this come and hope more graphic updates (Polys, textures, etc) are planned for the future.

[Arno12]

Where's my Stubble Dammit!!!

[Sorotia]

I just wish they add some more hair styles....I want a nice undercut like Sombra from Overwatch!

One can dream!

[aceman67]

I just wish they add some more hair styles....I want a nice undercut like Sombra from Overwatch!

One can dream!

They added that a long time ago

[Deleted]

Well, it looks HORRIBLE. The new hair texture is awful, well calling it a texture is exaggerating. It's simply a black color, looks like they used the bucket tool in Microsoft Paint. Using any lighter shade of black turns into light grey.

So yeah, it's awful... Thanks a lot......

[Sorotia]

They added that a long time ago

It's not the same though...the curls look out of place...I want straight hair...I've seriously never seen a undercut with curly hair before and I wonder every day where they got it from lol

[Petrarch]

They got it from here, a cosplayer by the name of Becka Noel. The style is taken from her actual hair and if you go to Drozana Station, you'll see that the ferengi tailor was replaced with a human tailor modelled after Noel.