Real-time Inextensible Hair with Volume and Shape

Abstract

Hair simulation is a common topic extensively studied in computer graphics. One of the many challenges in this field is simulating realistic hair in a real-time environment. In this paper, we propose a unified simulation scheme to consider three of the key features in hair simulation; inextensibility, shape preservation and hair-hair interaction. We use an extension to the Dynamic Follow the Leader (DFTL) method to include shape preservation. Our implementation is also coupled with a Lagrangian approach to address the hair-hair interaction dynamics. A GPU-friendly scheme is proposed that is able to exploit the massive parallelism these devices offer, being able to simulate thousands of strands in real-time. The method has been integrated in a game development platform with a shading model for rendering and several test applications have been developed using this implementation.