How Insomniac Games created Miles Morales Fade in Spider-Man: Miles Morales

As an Afro-Latino, it has always been a struggle to find hair like mine that actually looks good in video games. Whether that’s in single-player experiences with specific characters, or in games like Fallout where I can create my own character, I always look at the hair. And most of the time, the hair isn’t that great.

I’m often just limited to just some type of afro in games, which I don’t always have as a hairstyle. I got a little curious about why my hair was so hard to find.

In the first episode of Polygon’s series, Custom Made, we discover how hard it is to make textured hair in the games we love. Each episode, we’ll break down your favorite game mechanics, and this time, we spoke to the specialist behind Aloy’s hair in Horizon Zero Dawn about the process of creating a hairstyle with 100,000 polygons. We also caught up with the team at Insomniac Games to talk about how they developed Miles Morales’ hair on two different console generations for Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

You can find this video and all of Polygon’s videos on YouTube. Subscribe for more episodes of Custom Made.