LogInWho would've thought that the remake's biggest point of contention would be mesh topology?
Bloober Team
I doubt any of our readers would be surprised to hear this, but in 2024, the gaming and game development industries can sometimes feel like a drama club, with odd individuals arguing over just about anything imaginable – from legitimate issues new video games might have to topics so silly you'd never believe they could cause a stir. Recently, one such "silly" drama unfolded on, you guessed it, Twitter over the mesh topology of Pyramid Head's helmet, of all things, from the newly released Silent Hill 2 Remake.
It all began when a VTuber and streamer known as Noora decided to highlight how SH2's remake version handled the 3D helmet model of one of the most iconic video game baddies of all time.
What was meant to be a simple observation of the model's "surprising topology", which, you have to admit, does look a bit unconventional, to say the least, somehow launched the weirdest comment war ever, with one side lambasting Bloober for allegedly not optimizing their meshes and the other criticizing Noora for what they perceived as her attempt to unfairly nitpick the remake, resulting in a heated debate where both sides seemed equally unreasonable.
Bloober Team
Luckily, even among the sea of pointless negativity, there were a few islands of calm sensibility represented by Game Developers and 3D Artists, who explained the reasons why the helmet's topology could have been designed the way it was.
Game Developer Chris Bischoff, for example, suggested that the topology could be explained by Bloober's use of Nanite, a virtualized geometry system within Unreal Engine 5, an engine that powers Silent Hill 2 Remake. If Nanite was indeed utilized here, Bloober would be able to largely disregard the geometry density, as it's relatively cheap to render, unlike, for instance, a 2K Normal Map that would add an additional load on memory.
"I'm assuming that this model was detailed using Vertex painting on the denser areas," Chris noted. "Vertex painting is much cheaper than regular texturing because the data already exists in the model and is going to be rendered anyway."
The most likely explanation, however, was shared by Environment Artist at JangaFX and former Rockstar Artist MacKenzie Shirk, who stated that the model's unusual topology was intentionally set up to give the helmet a silhouette, something that cannot be done with Normal Maps, which were also used here.
According to Shirk, it's relatively easy to render geometry on modern 2024 hardware, and if Bloober wanted to leverage that to push the remake's visuals to their limit, they could have easily done so by using decimation to retain the detail density. Furthermore, the artist explained that the model in question is almost certainly used only in close-up shots and cinematics, switching to a different LOD mesh when further away from the camera, thereby increasing performance.
"That detail is there for the silhouette," commented Shirk. "Not lazy devs, not because they don't know what they're doing, not because they ripped the model, not because Nanite, etc."
Twitter user Fripe16 also went ahead and extracted the model to offer an even closer look at it:
Also, check out these incredible tutorials on the topic of topology and topology in video games specifically:
With the mystery behind the helmet's appearance seemingly solved, it's safe to say that this particular drama at least has a happy ending. The two main takeaways here are: 1) don't criticize the technical aspects of a video game if your skills begin and end with deleting Blender's default cube, and 2) people really will argue about anything. On the bright side, at least this unusual topology was real, unlike the fake – albeit hilarious – "Starfield sandwich and apple topologies" that got memed to oblivion last year:
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