Capcom nearly cut Pragmata's Diana hair to save animation cost

Capcom considered giving Diana, the robot companion character in its science-fiction action game Pragmata, a substantially shorter haircut during development, in order to reduce the cost of animating her hair. Developers Kenji Irie and Serina Ohara described the decision in a talk on hair and facial animation at the 2026 Computer Entertainment Developers Conference, reported by Famitsu and translated by Automaton.

The cost in question comes from the technique Capcom chose. Many games animate hair with hair cards — flat polygons carrying a hair texture — which are comparatively cheap to move. Pragmata instead renders Diana's hair as individual strands, which is more realistic and far more expensive to compute. The developers put the gap in concrete terms: animating her hair with cards would have needed roughly 22 joints, against about 430,000 animation points for individually simulated strands.

Why the studio kept it

Capcom judged the effect worth the expense. According to the talk, the flowing strands were intended to "convey a sense of life on the moon," where the game is set, as the hair moves in low gravity. The team nonetheless returned to the question more than once: a shorter cut was raised as early as the 2D concept art stage, and again in the middle of development, when a test model was built specifically to see whether the change would relieve the cost problem.

Neither review resulted in a redesign. Capcom instead found ways to bring the cost down within the existing look, and the shipped model uses an average of fewer than 20,000 individual strands. The shorter style did make it into the finished game elsewhere: Diana's sister, Eight, wears a bob.

Pragmata released earlier this year and has drawn continued discussion of Diana's design since launch. Capcom has not said whether the strand-based system will carry over to its other projects.