The HERO PORTRAIT STUDIO Relaunch

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I understood about 5% of the technical stuff....

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Ambient occlusion and image based lighting are basically workarounds to simulate radiosity (light that bounces and reflects the way it does in the real world. ).

Subsurface scattering refers to the way light enters into certain materials and is redirected causing a glow effect. Like the way your ear turns red when there is a light behind you.

I take the optimized morphs thing to mean they use stock figures that are tweaked to approximate individual characters.

"Photo-real multi-level translucent core texture maps"

Generally when you texture something in 3d, the information is broken down into channels. So you have a color channel, diffuse channel, specular channel, luminosity channel, bump channel, gloss channel, etc. So you make all these different textures that go into each channel to precisely control each attribute. Then when you render, all this information is combined into the final look.

There are lots of solutions out there for these things, the real catch is the technical prowess and artistic vision to pull it off. Welcome guys, best of luck!

Frozen,
Thank you for de-jargoning the tech stuff. I rarely think to do that.

Guys,
On behalf of the HPS crew, thank you for all the positive feedback!
While we're all gamers in some way, four of us are rabid CoH/V players, and have been for a little while. So this game is like home...

We will work hard to be worthy of your kind words!
Thank you for giving us a shot.