Will we get realistic hair next gen?

[JacksBleedingEyes]

Well if they can I hope they use that for more usefull things, like more trannies in the CPU...

trannies ei?

They could do realistic hair, but depending on the genre, whats the point of having realistic hair in a fast paced FPS (in fighting games, or adventure games Im sure, they would have no problems)

 

[jvd]

While hair is nice , i much rather have more realistic maps than hair . Hair can come later

 

[liverkick]

Apologies for furthering this Queer Eye for the Render Guy thread...but what was the best hair this gen, if any? I kinda thought every game looked like the characters had clay wigs on to be honest. It seems like its one of the harder things to even fake well.

 

[ralexand]

Apologies for furthering this Queer Eye for the Render Guy thread...but what was the best hair this gen, if any? I kinda thought every game looked like the characters had clay wigs on to be honest. It seems like its one of the harder things to even fake well.

That's the thing it must be so computationally difficult that no one really attempted it for human characters at least. Rare made a decent attempt with animal characters in starfox and conker.

 

[Shark Sandwich]

Apologies for furthering this Queer Eye for the Render Guy thread...but what was the best hair this gen, if any? I kinda thought every game looked like the characters had clay wigs on to be honest. It seems like its one of the harder things to even fake well.

In Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles for Gamecube, the moogles and some of the playable characters had some amazing looking fur, although it didn't move around much. Also, your view was so zoomed out most of the time that you don't see it. Nevertheless, it looked awesome whenever the camera was close enough to see.

Square Enix truly is at the forefront of videogame hair technology.

 

[Shark Sandwich]

 

[Farid]

Square Enix truly is at the forefront of videogame hair technology.

http://www.pvrdev.com/pub/PC/eg/h/Fur.htm

 

[_phil_]

would a geometry shader help ?

 

[Iron Tiger]

A hair shader can be made relatively simply that takes the lighting shadowing data as it will be rendered on the hairless model, and applies it to the "root" of each hair that is to be "grown" in that location. It would only look good for relatively short hair (and no complex, intertwining, overlapping hairstyles), and I've heard that it does indeed work well. To animate the hair, the strands can just be "clumped" together and moved in sync. That's how it was done in Shrek 2, and it looked quite good.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's not the methodology (although at the high end, in movie VFX, there's still lots of research to do), but about the fact that calculating all the dynamics is just too much for realtime. Then there's the problem of rendering ten thousands of hair strands, for normal renders and shadow map renders... and shadow map bias problems... It'll be fake hair for this gen, IMHO.

 

[ralexand]

It'll be fake hair for this gen, IMHO.

Boo! Can't they just use like a particle system that you can shape with like a digital force comb?

 

[BOOMEXPLODE]

nVidias Nalu demo had truely amazing hair (so does the new Luna demo, but it's not exactly realistic). Ultimately I think hair next generation will be hit or miss. I expect the Final Fantasy games atleast will have great hair (that is to say, realistic hair, even if it's awful)

 

[Npl]

It's not the methodology (although at the high end, in movie VFX, there's still lots of research to do), but about the fact that calculating all the dynamics is just too much for realtime. Then there's the problem of rendering ten thousands of hair strands, for normal renders and shadow map renders... and shadow map bias problems... It'll be fake hair for this gen, IMHO.

You mean CG is real ? It will still take decades until youre unable to spot the difference between reality and CG/Games (and the fact that your vision gets poorer when your older sure helps )

 

[ralexand]

nVidias Nalu demo had truely amazing hair (so does the new Luna demo, but it's not exactly realistic). Ultimately I think hair next generation will be hit or miss. I expect the Final Fantasy games atleast will have great hair (that is to say, realistic hair, even if it's awful)

The question though is why aren't we seeing that type of hair in games. Is it a question of only nvidia cards supporting it?

 

[BOOMEXPLODE]

Well they kind of "cheat" in the Nalu demo because it's underwater, so doing collision on the hair is unnecessary, it just kind of "floats". The same is true for the Luna demo (it's not underwater, but her hair floats like it is). Maybe with Cell thrown into the mix you could do some collision detection on the hair strands and actually use something like this in a game, but it probably would only be useable in situations where there's not alot else going on (maybe fighting games).