Curly Hair Rendering

Shyh-Chyh Richard Wang, MSc thesis 2000

Abstract

Have you ever seen artificially synthesised hair in movies or games? Was there well rendered curly hair? There are still a lot of problems to solve. This thesis develops several technique for representing and rendering curly hair. First, we present solutions for the problem of representing curly hair. We describe a method to represent the geometry of a wisp of hair strands, which can produce realistic-looking curly hairs with various hair properties including various curlyness, various length, and various colours.

Secondly, we present solutions to the problem of rendering hair. We describe a new method for modeling the shadow under hairs, which is a physics-based shadow model. The shadow model can be accelerated under the support of a specification for rendering accelerators such as the specification of OpenGL. We also extended a light reflection computation, which using a rendering accelerator supported texture mapping techniques to speed up the computation and was used only on fine curves without modeling shadows on them, such that we can speed up the light reflection with the support of rendering accelerator. We also address the issue of antialiasing and describe and evaluate several different methods, which are also can be accelerated under the support of the above mentioned specification.

Thesis

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Images

Long hair

Hair of medium length

Short hair