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Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II has been getting a lot of attention this week. Microsoft incorporated the upcoming game into its fall Xbox marketing campaign. It even was shown on the really, really big Las Vegas Sphere on Thursday night.
Today, developer Ninja Theory posted the latest in its infrequent video dev diary series for Hellblade II. The new entry, Crafting Senua, shows how the developer is taking some extra steps in creating the characters in the game, focusing on its lead Senua.
The clip shows that not only is Ninja Theory scanning the likeness of Senua’s actor, Melina Juergens, but the team is putting her in full makeup and costume to scan as well. For the first Hellblade game, her costume was created with software, but for the sequel, the developer is going all out to make sure her outfit looks as realistic as possible.
It states:
These are crafted with expert costume designers using traditional materials and techniques accurate to the time period to achieve a level of realism and detail that simply wouldn’t be possible using purely digital techniques.
Juergens states in the video that she can become more attached to playing Senua because she can see herself in the full makeup and outfit, which was not done for the first game.
The detailed work even extended to the look of Senua’s hair. The hair and makeup team tried to use Juergens’s natural hair for the character, but in the end, they used an air weave which got decorated with ash and pigment.
Ninja Theory worked with a company called 3Lateral to scan Juergens to make her digital counterpart. For the first game, it captured a gigabyte of data from her to use in the game. For the sequel, they are capturing terabytes of data for just one minute of recording to achieve a photo-realistic look.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is currently targeting a 2024 release date for Xbox consoles and the PC, and will also be released for Xbox Game Pass.
