I'm just curious, what do you guys find ugly about the screenshot? The NPC? Because the forest looks beautiful IMO. I'm cool with the NPC too.

I think most are distracted by the hair of the guy, which is really looking not good. Its just plain and without depth.
But as PhYoshi said, it may be the lightning.
The scenery on the other side looks fantastic

Oh, no, the forest looks great and if I can walk through something like that on eleventy eleven I'll be happy - but that character looks appalling. The clothes have incredibly muddy textures, the shadow is very low resolution and the lighting swaps between "skin tone" and "pure white" in the space of a few inches, and the hair looks worse than oblivion's - and it's bent somehow. Like it's a solid block of something, not like it's made of strands. If somebody said "That character was actually pasted on top of the screenshot from a PS2 game" I wouldn't be surprised.

At least they'll have the hair showing under the helmet (according to one of the screenshots). But yeah the hair itself looks still rather helmetish. I'm really suprised that the cloth textures are so muddy, I mean even oblivion had sharper ones. Maybe its too early to say they won't be sharper in the final release.

The hair is bent because it’s rigged to head, neck and chest just like hoods in Oblivion while hair was only rigged to the head so long hair did not work in Oblivion. They should design it so it did not get the visible bend, as character is very often bending forward

Else I’m quite happy with the result; prefer that over only short hair.

wouldnt count on it. personally i dont care that much either. would of course be a + but meh

Yes, the hair looks like crap, but I don't care about hair, I always make a short haircut and wear a helmet after all. But his sleeve is angled. That is what bothers me (except the low-res textures of his clothes). Nevertheless, that forest is No1 forest in game development history :thumbsup:

I wonder how much slowdown we'd get playing a Khajiit with realistic hair physics :tongue:

Honestly, hair physics really doesn't bother me. I'll be playing in First Person most of the time anyway. As long as the world is interesting, and engaging (and let's be honest, looking beautiful), then the having a slightly worse looking character model is not a big deal. The NPC's I've seen look fairly good. Of course graphical boosts are welcome, but I'd mch rather have gameplay come first. From what I've seen Bethesda think so too. I can live with the model shown if I'm going to lose 100's of hours of my life to this game.

I know that you are just joking, but anyway, in games that have hair physics, animal/beast/whatever that have short furs are ignored, and just textured normally like how Oblivion did.

Simulating each individual hair isn't happening, but weakly simulating large clumps and using geometry instancing to draw them all could actually be done with a fairly low performance hit. It'd look brilliant around the edges of clothing!

I don't expect mind-blowing character models and physics, but I'm confident that Bethesda will make sure that everything looks better than it did in Oblivion. So I think that those muddy character textures will be replaced with better ones.

By the way: It looks like the quiver and sword will finally be attached to your back with a leather strap instead of just hovering there!

Most Khajiit has pretty short fur; but just a good fur texture is dammed hard to get right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8c-YYdB4g This is a poser animation, walking one round took 6 hour rendering.

Now a mammoth with realistic hair physic would be demanding, as in render farm not graphic card.

Hmmm... Was I the only one who watched that video the whole nine minuts?

I think there will be, at least, cloth physics... look at the screen in the mountain, with the dragon flying and the character beside some old walls... the cloths of his armor is moving with the wind.

Hair Physics?!

Hehehe does this mean that when I:

Fire a lightning bolt at an NPC, it's hair will stand on-end like they were holding a Vandigraph generator?

Or when I hurl a fireball at them, their hair will catch-fire and send them running around like a giant torch?

Or perhaps when you win a fabulous night with the prince/princess, will their hair be all messed up when the fade-to-black vanishes?

Well, then Yes!

Otherwise, I'll just pick the "ugly" random button in character creation and chalk it up to "Helmet Hair" for this game.

According to the podcast, it's the ugly button no more! Now random creation result in acceptable characters!

I have no problem with the scenery in the screenshot, the landscape, etc, it looks amazing. Really does.
But then you have this hideous looking NPC with huge hands and hair that bends back with the shape of his body, obviously mapped to the skeleton (a horrible idea).

This screenshot seriously looks like someone took scenery SS of TES:V, photoshopped a character from Fable 1 in it, and this is what we got. The character in this screenshot looks absolutely nothing like any other screenshots we've seen. I don't even see how this is real. WTF is wrong with his head? His hands? Why are they so awkward looking? Why does this guys head look like a Hunter from the Halo series without a helmet on? It just looks like his head is a mass of fibers that is protruding out of his shirt. Why is the cuff of his short sleeve shirt sleeves an octagon and not round?

I really hope this is a case of "it's an early build screenshot", because if this is how the NPC's are going to look in this game, looks like we took a step back into 2003.

I don't really care about hair, the way oblivion done it was fine to me.

the hair and cloths look stuck

so maybe in ES 6

They can simulate a full head of hair. It just slows the most powerful systems to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF8CUSiPDJ0

Maybe in the 9th generation of video games...

So you don't simulate every strand. You don't call of physics at all because you can't do it down to the subatomic level, do you? Video games are all about abstracting what's neccesary, and the technology behind them is no different.

I know that I am the creepy person who goes too far when I say *DO NOT SPOIL YOUR VIRGIN EYES* ...............................................

Wow.....you do understand MANY games have used physics in hair already, even on consoles. That is simulating EACH individual piece of hair. You don't NEED that to have some physics on hair, it can be done in parts (not each strand) and still look extremely better then your non-physis blocks of plastic looking hair.

Hair tends to move in clumps anyway.