Dragon Age: Veilguard's impressive hair features '50,000 individual threads per character' for over 100 different hairstyles

This is a judgement-free zone, so feel free to make whatever changes you want. Chances are, you've noticed how everyone in Thedas has gorgeous hair that looks like it came straight out of glossy hair care ads.

In a recent post on its blog, publisher EA gives us a look behind the curtain of hair to see all the technology that goes into creating those incredible tresses. Bioware, a developer of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, used EA's Frostbite engine to build the game. Both companies worked together to "elevate EA's Strand Hair technology."

The Veilguard’s fantasy setting presented "unique challenges." Bioware had to design hairstyles for the Veilguard that could withstand even the most intense of combat, as well as those that would work with the Qunari horns and other setting-specific elements.

The developers focused on three main goals when it came to hair tech: lifelike realism, even at 60 frames per seconds, physics-driven hairstyles that adapt to character movement as well as environmental effects, and perhaps most impressively "50,000 individual hair strands for over 100 hairstyles."

How did the high-tech hairstylists fare? The Veilguard character creator is wasting hours, and in one case an entire day, on rooks. Tiktoks that highlight the swishy physics of hair are also receiving millions of views, revealing a level of detail never seen before.

EA shares that the Frostbite team "increased maximum hair length from 64 points to 255", hence Rook's incredible head of hair in this brawl. Rook's hair is swishy as they fight in search of Tevinter Mage Neve Galus. It's so realistic that you almost wish they had tied their hair back up before they started.

EA explains their Strand Hair technology isn't rendered in Frostbite like other features, but instead requires "a bespoke compute-software rasterizer" to "combine hair into the frame." This tech was originally designed for sports games that use depth of field effects in order to mimic broadcasting techniques. However, importing it to Thedas proved to be a bit of a challenge. Strand Hair didn't work well with transparent objects such as volumetric fog and sparkly spell effects. If you left these knots untangled, it's likely that you'd see visual glitches like background elements clipping or heavy shadows around parts of your character’s hair.

To solve this problem, Bioware divides the hair into layers: an opaque rendering pass and another transparent pass. James Power, senior renderer at Bioware, explains in detail how the team tackled the problem on EA's blog. He compares the studio's new technique to "masking textures" that allow the right parts of an image to be displayed on the correct layer. Instead of having Rook's stunning bonce dominate the topmost layer in the image, the hair can be softened with volumetric lighting effects. The overall image is given a sense of depth.

The real trick is rendering multiple heads with hair in one image and not affecting frame rates across a range of GPUs that have varying levels of graphics memory. EA shares that "On average, the GPU cost is around 128 MB for the full field (eight hair assets). This is like pulling a rabbit from a hat." It's like dedicating 1/63 of the memory on an 8 GB graphics card to hair.

James Power returns to explain that Strand Hair assets were given a strict "maximum budget" to ensure your adventure in Thedas runs smoothly. He also adds the team uses a number other established dev techniques, such as turning hair simulation off if the asset appears off screen or from a distance, to ensure your GPU isn't too taxed. It's easy for devs to forget that they didn't use these tricks in the past. For example, Final Fantasy XV used Nvidia HairWorks even when characters were miles away from the camera.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard avoids such performance pitfalls. On lower settings, you can swap the dynamic Strand Hair assets with standard Card Hair assets - just in case you want to keep the fire-breathing to your dragons.