Why oh why do hats/helmets make your characters lose all his/her hair?
This was always so weird to me whenever I play a female game and so many helmets have the back of their heads exposed, letting you see a completely exposed baldness.
But other games have headwear that doesn’t make you into a chemotherapy patient. It’s possible, they’re just too lazy.
Other mmo games with character customization?Example? It’s not that easy to do when your game have tons of hairstyles…part of hair mesh can’t just magically disappear to avoid serious clipping…each hairstyle should be edited to look good with specific hat\helmet.
Why oh why do hats/helmets make your characters lose all his/her hair?
This was always so weird to me whenever I play a female game and so many helmets have the back of their heads exposed, letting you see a completely exposed baldness.
Or when they’re wearing a top hat, for example.
I’ve yet to see a game do it well with the variety of hair styles we have here. With say the Asura’s beehive hairstyle it’d stick out of helmets/hair, now it might actually look good, but it might look like poopy. So there’s the choice ANet had to make. Accept the clipping and let players choose the combinations they find acceptable/good, or have it blank out the hair for consistency. It’s one or the other, they can’t cut out parts of hair, it just doesn’t work with the systems in place and would likely take a lot of effort to do so, much more than is reasonable.
But other games have headwear that doesn’t make you into a chemotherapy patient. It’s possible, they’re just too lazy.
Other mmo games with character customization?Example? It’s not that easy to do when your game have tons of hairstyles…part of hair mesh can’t just magically disappear to avoid serious clipping…each hairstyle should be edited to look good with specific hat\helmet.
World of Warcraft, Saints Row, the Bethesda Fallout games. All you have to do is have an inner and outer mesh for long hairstyles and turn off the outer one. This problem was solved a long time ago and I can’t believe Anet hasn’t caught up.
Because the hat counts as a brand new hair and not just an accessory,that is what I think.
So when you put on a hat you are actually changing your character’s hairstyle and the one you are using is replaced with that one with the hat (none = bald)
If it’s too much trouble to adjust every single hat to the various hairstyles, why not simply add a hairstyle to the hats?
For example: If you put on the Ringmaster’kitten there could be some visible hair attached to it like some short hair for males and maybe some curls for females.
Of course this would not be a perfect solution, but at least our characters would not be bald.
Because the hat counts as a brand new hair and not just an accessory,that is what I think.
So when you put on a hat you are actually changing your character’s hairstyle and the one you are using is replaced with that one with the hat (none = bald)
That’s not a reason, it’s just a way of implementing a decision they made (lazy bald models). There’s plenty of headwear that doesn’t disable (and sometimes clips with) hair.
I know I post it in every thread about hats, before the first Halloween event, our characters’ scalp textures were different, they had hair drawn on them, but for some reason, after the Halloween patch hit, it was changed to the bald one for everyone.
In GW1 things like a top hat or ravenheart’s witchwear hat had additional colorable hair mesh (speaking of female characters), which just looked like your toon pinned their hair in a bun to fit under the hat.
Why not do that again, it’s beyond me.
Attachments:
No, No, No! Mummified flesh on the left! Dried bones on the right!
But other games have headwear that doesn’t make you into a chemotherapy patient. It’s possible, they’re just too lazy.
Other mmo games with character customization?Example? It’s not that easy to do when your game have tons of hairstyles…part of hair mesh can’t just magically disappear to avoid serious clipping…each hairstyle should be edited to look good with specific hat\helmet.
World of Warcraft, Saints Row, the Bethesda Fallout games. All you have to do is have an inner and outer mesh for long hairstyles and turn off the outer one. This problem was solved a long time ago and I can’t believe Anet hasn’t caught up.
Skyrim\Fallout using one mesh for all types of long hairstyles which looks almost the same…here we have tons of really different and difficult hairstyles…it will work, yes, but it won’t work just as good as in Beth games, will be too obvious that hairstyles are different :\
But other games have headwear that doesn’t make you into a chemotherapy patient. It’s possible, they’re just too lazy.
Other mmo games with character customization?Example? It’s not that easy to do when your game have tons of hairstyles…part of hair mesh can’t just magically disappear to avoid serious clipping…each hairstyle should be edited to look good with specific hat\helmet.
World of Warcraft, Saints Row, the Bethesda Fallout games. All you have to do is have an inner and outer mesh for long hairstyles and turn off the outer one. This problem was solved a long time ago and I can’t believe Anet hasn’t caught up.
Skyrim\Fallout using one mesh for all types of long hairstyles which looks almost the same…here we have tons of really different and difficult hairstyles…it will work, yes, but it won’t work just as good as in Beth games, will be too obvious that hairstyles are different :\
It worked just fine in GW1 and the beta, and even if it was slightly ill-fitting it would be better than the characters just going bald.
The baldness thing really bothers me whenever i see people who wear the hat. I mean its totally fine to make your character bald if you want, but i dont think it should be inherent in the design of the hat.
On a side note a lot of the helms for heavy armor and some for medium fit way too snugly on the characters head – male and female, and look really awkward. Its the main reason why my chars will never wear helms bc very few of them look ok. (examples of bad ones – Illustrious medium helm, aetherblade medium helm with certain dyes, all of the heavy loot armors, carapace heavy)
If it bothers me, I don’t show the helm. Besides, if Anet changed the hair to fit the hat, then people would complain that they lost their chosen hair style. Seems a lose-lose situation for the developer.
As hair is modeled here not to be individual strands that can be controlled, and they did not create a new “skin” for each hat/helmet with all the variations of hair, the hair would stick right out of the helmet and look utterly uggly.
So they went the less expensive route of removing hair and putting the helmet on that way so it would not have clipping issues.
Because they didn’t do a double mesh at the start as a previous poster suggested as done in other games, the rework effort most likely was deemed not cost effective to implement.
Would you rather be bald or see a charr super saiyan hairdo clipping with the ringmaster hat?
We know they can have pieces of geometry on armor removed depending on what other pieces they are paired with, because they have done such when fixing several clipping issues in the past.
The real reason hats remove hair completely is because for some reason Anet designed most of the hats and helms to use the same seams and be considered the same object as your hair by the modeling engine, instead of a separate object above the geometry like most of the shoulder and some of the glove and boot items.
In short, they could totally fix this, but it would take a bit of work for each affected item.
As hair is modeled here not to be individual strands that can be controlled, and they did not create a new “skin” for each hat/helmet with all the variations of hair, the hair would stick right out of the helmet and look utterly uggly.
So they went the less expensive route of removing hair and putting the helmet on that way so it would not have clipping issues.
Because they didn’t do a double mesh at the start as a previous poster suggested as done in other games, the rework effort most likely was deemed not cost effective to implement.
how bizarre because literally every MMO (not exaggerating. every. MMO.) that I’ve played before did not have this issue where a character is turned bald for the sake of minimizing clipping.
I’ve seen this occur in many other MMO’s. The reason for this is because your character’s hair is made standalone. Once you wear a helmet that covers large areas it seems to replace the hair. It can be fixed but it is alot of work, by basically adding the relevant parts of hair from the player to the helmet for all hair styles and every species. Another solution is the put the hair in a default style per species and gender whenever you wear such a helmet. This would take alot less work although I’m sure it’ll still annoy some people. I don’t use the witches hat and similar headgear because it removes the hair though and I agree it’s a bit ugly.
