New method enables more realistic hair simulation
Source: Disney Research
Credit: Disney Research
When a person has a bad hair day, that's unfortunate. When a virtual character has bad hair, an entire animation video or film can look unrealistic. A new innovative method developed by Disney Research makes it possible to realistically simulate hair by observing real hair in motion.
One advantage of this new method is that once these simulation parameters have been determined, it is possible to edit the animation so that a hairstyle responds realistically to changes in head motion, to whether the hair is wet, oily or contains styling products, and in response to external forces, such as wind.
"The core idea is very simple: we do an educated guess of the simulation parameters and then use input data to validate this hypothesis," said Thabo Beeler, senior research scientist and leader of Disney Research's Capture and Effects Group. "It's an approach that applies to virtually any hair simulation technique."
The Disney researchers will present their method at the European Association for Computer Graphics annual conference, Eurographics 2017, April 24-28 in Lyon, France.
"After the face, hairstyle is one of the most important features that define an animated character, so modeling and animating hair is an area of intense research interest," noted Markus Gross, vice president at Disney Research. "Simulating tens of thousands of hair strands is difficult, so this work to improve the capture of real hair motion from video is a major step forward."
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