There's a lot to love about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but one of its most impressive and appreciated technical aspects is undoubtedly the advanced rendering of character hair.
Hairstyles move and wave naturally as you and your party walk, while long hair falls behind as you run. Your entire hairstyle reacts if you are hit by a sudden force or object.
There are up to 50,000 strands of hair on each of the main characters in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, powered by something BioWare and EA's Frostbite engine team call Strand Hair technology. It's something that was originally worked on for EA Sports FC, but has been significantly expanded here.
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“While Strand Hair is present in other EA games, the BioWare team had to push the envelope even further for Dragon Age: The Veilguard,” EA writes in an in-depth new post on the Stand Hair blog. “For example, implementing Strand Hair technology for characters who have waist-length hair and horns on their heads presented some unique challenges.
“With seamlessly moving hair attachments and decoupling between simulation and rendering tessellation, this is the first EA game to offer such detailed physics-driven long hairstyles. The Frostbite team increased the maximum hair length from 63 points to 255 and implemented a new system for complex hair structures such as braids.”
Tomb Raider's TressFX eats your heart out.
There are some detailed technical notes on how it all works, though perhaps the most interesting part here is how BioWare had to overcome the difficulties of managing the wealth of other semi-transparent objects on the screen. At EA Sports FC this had not been a big problem. Here, in scenes often shrouded in fog, smog or fire, it was.
Ultimately, BioWare developed a system where each hairstyle is rendered multiple times, with opaque and transparent layers rendered and then blended on the fly.
“We first make the opaque part of the hair strands, then we make the objects transparent,” noted James Power, senior rendering engineer at BioWare. “Shaders for transparent objects use the depth texture of the transparent hair to determine whether the shading pixel is 'below' or 'above' the strand of hair. If it is below, it renders the hair and marks a tip of stencil (think of it as masking texture).”
Here too there is discussion of how Strand Hair's “high memory” is handled without degrading performance. Dragon Age The Veilguard would never have had a full team of 22 characters on screen, all with Strand Hair at the same time, as was the case with EA Sports FC. But the added complexity of longer hair and more technical environments means BioWare needed ways to adjust memory usage when multiple characters are shown.
For lower quality settings on PC, as well as on Xbox Series S, the ability to ditch Strand Hair for more standard hairstyle assets is also supported.
Are you trying to move forward? Here are our best tips and tricks for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and if you're getting close to the ending, how to get the best ending in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.