Dragon Age: The Veilguard's hair technology features 50,000 individual strands per character

Rook, the main character, from Dragon Age: The Veilguard

(Image credit: EA/BioWare)

EA has shared how BioWare and Frostbite created Dragon Age: The Veilguard's hair strand technology
The hair technology features 50,000 individual strands per character
Stand hair technology is present in other EA games, but BioWare had to push the limits further for The Veilguard

EA has revealed how Dragon Age: The Veilguard's hair strand technology was brought to life.

In a new blog post, the development team at BioWare and the Frostbite Engine provided a deep dive into the technology that was able to give the characters of The Veilguard the best hair the series has ever seen.

In total, 50,000 individual strands make up one hairstyle per character for over 100 hairstyles in the game, allowing for natural motion and adaptability to various character movements and environments.

"Harnessing the power of the Frostbite engine, Strand Hair technology transforms your character's locks into a living tapestry of thousands of individual strands," EA said. "Strand Hair technology combines physics with real-time rendering to simulate believable modeling of human hair."

Frostbite spent years advancing its hair-rendering tech and has been featured in previous EA titles like EA Sports FC and Madden NFL, however, for The Veilguard, BioWare was required to push the limits even further.

"With hair attachments that move seamlessly, and the decoupling of simulation and render tessellation, this is the first EA game to offer such detailed physics-driven long hairstyles," EA explained. "The Frostbite team increased maximum hair length from 63 points to 255, and implemented a new system for complex hair structures like braids."

A character's build and physical traits also played a role in how the hair tech was implemented, as well as all sorts of different lighting that was considered. Frostbite and BioWare also worked together to make sure hair was accurately responsive to shadows and environmental lighting.

"The collaboration between Frostbite and the BioWare engineering team was key to supporting complex hairstyles. Advancing the technology for intricate styles and optimizing performance ensured that specific moments, like when hair covers a large percentage of the screen in certain cinematics, run smoothly," said BioWare's studio technical director, Maciej Kurowski.

The post goes into greater detail on how Frostbite and BioWare were able to counter some of the difficulties that came with creating realistic hair when dealing with other semi-transparent objects.

BioWare developed a new technique for blending hair with transparent visual and environmental effects, like volumetric fog and other participating media.

"We first render the opaque part of strand hair, and then we render transparent objects," said BioWare's senior rendering engineer James Power noted. "The shaders for the transparent objects use the transparent hair depth texture to determine whether the shading pixel is 'under' or 'on top' of the strand hair. If it's below, it renders the hair and marks a stencil bit (think of it as a masking texture)."

It's a complicated process and the post even goes into how each Strand Hair asset, each with high strand counts and tessellation settings, has a "high memory footprint" which is why the game offers players the option to turn the feature off for better performance.