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Nvidia has just provided an impressive demonstration of HairWorks 1.1, flaunting the real-time calculation of around half a million virtual hairs.
In this article from Techfrag.com, we see how Nvidia has taken their Hairworks rendering program for human hair and changed the scale from the maximum of 22,000 to 500,000 hairs in a video.
Previously, Nvidia has conducted tests with 22,000 separate strands, that has been quite a success. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is among the first games to take advantage of the Nvidia HairWorks, using which it has greatly enhanced the visible hairstyles of the characters in the game.
But the work of the latest version 1.1 is just breathtaking, as it creates a realistic looking representation of human hair.
The card used to record the video is GeForce GTX 980, and it's not used because it is enough powerful, but the fact that HairWorks functionality only supports NVIDIA cards. Which means AMD Radeon card owners won't be able to enjoy this remarkable effect.
AMD has a competitive (and Open Source) product that will run on both the AMD Radeon and Nvidia graphics cards called TressFX.
Original Submission
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:15PM
Meanwhile, in the real world, real living human performers use hair gel and hair spray specifically to stop their hair from fluttering, so they can look presentable on stage and on camera.
What's next? Realistic skin complete with pores, sweat, and blackheads? You know what, I will never ever buy a game which uses that technology either.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 06 2015, @12:47AM
Meanwhile, in the real world, real living humans' scalp has an average of 100,000 hair follicles, with rare cases of around 150,000.
No, unlike cats and rabbits skin, a human hair follicle doesn't produce more than one strand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @12:41AM
To the two or more ingrow hairs I have coming from the same pores.
The ones around my nipples I've gotten up to three hairs by tweezing.
So yes, humans can have multiple hair follicles coming from the same pore, most just don't stimulate them enough for it to happen naturally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @02:50AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @08:02AM
Games today intentionally introduce garbage like chromatic aberration that causes eye strain too, they'll do everything in their power to distract from the vapidity of the gameplay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @08:31AM
You think hair is bad? Look at the man-years that went into duplicating lens-flare on the game side, and eliminating it on the movie side. At least until JJ Abrams went crazy with it.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Subsentient on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:20PM
Let's get some realistic face cheese effects. Realistic festering, infected pus-filled zits. If the player hits the X button, they explode on the camera.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jimshatt on Monday July 06 2015, @12:11AM
Maybe not very realistic, but gross nonetheless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @01:29AM
(Score: 2, Funny) by Pino P on Monday July 06 2015, @01:07PM
If the player hits the X button, they explode on the camera.
Which button is X again? It's been in all four positions [pineight.com].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:27PM
America's next terrorist mastermind will be a completely virtual nonexistent enemy leader, with realistically rendered unkempt hair. Unkempt hair means he's evil, people. No one will ever see our enemy in person, but no one will need to, because videos of him will be all over social media. American patriots, join the war today against our fictional enemy's very real followers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:35PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:42PM
Barkeep, give me a half litre of Victory Gin.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Monday July 06 2015, @02:01AM
They can already do this with pre-rendered video. The notable thing about this is that they're getting closer to being able to do it in real time based upon what's actually happening.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @09:40AM
That sounds questionable. Computer graphics is nowhere near being able to render convincing realistic scenes. Do you have any links?
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:34AM
Of course they can, it's just that if you want realistic scenes you normally just hire actors and film outside.
But, if you've watched the Lord of the Rings, there's that sequence where they're fleeing down those steep stairs and jumping over that missing section of bridge while running from the Balrog. That was completely CGI. Not to mention those sequences with hundreds of thousands of orcs in those battles. The last Indiana Jones movie has a sequence where they were fighting in the jungle as the trucks drove along, and almost all of that was computer based.
Pixar for Monsters Inc., had to render hundreds of thousands of hairs individually on those monsters as well.
The point here is that we reached the point where this was possible years ago. It's just that in most cases it makes more sense to just hire some actors and film them rather than get a team working to create something that already exists somewhere.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday July 06 2015, @02:06PM
Adam Selene!
(Score: 0, Troll) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:57PM
Because I really enjoy the actual work, I no longer apply for gaming jobs because I cant see how my work would solve anyone's problem.
Dr. Tani Newell is one of my closest friends as well as a former girlfriend - she was the only one my ex-wife approved of my being friends with. I dont really know Gabe Newell but I have spoken to him a couple times.
Gabe regards Tani as a total slacker because shrinks dont make much money. Tani regards Gabe as a total slacker because he spends all his time making video games.
I am in Tani's camp; I know all kinds of ways to come up with unicorns but I dont because I feel that a better way to solve the many problems we all face is by writing. However I am well aware I would not know how to solve most of the problems had I not devoted so many years to writing really stupid products.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:03AM
Pussy Shaver. You know it's someone's fetish. Don't you want to help them out by making a game in which they can shave a really hairy bush anytime they want to?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 06 2015, @12:07AM
Is so I can afford an Oculus Rift.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday July 06 2015, @11:37PM
Here's hoping it won't cost as much as my computer . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:09AM
havok and physX fyi. more pls
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 06 2015, @01:13AM
WccfTech has an even deeper technical analyze [wccftech.com]. But the big question is, will this work with BSDs and Linux (ie x.org) ?
Of course OpenGL API..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @08:04AM
He needs a hair cut.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Monday July 06 2015, @09:02AM
They also need to spend a little more time looking at how people's hair actually looks & moves... I was surprised to see so many people being impressed by the video, because it didn't look like real hair to me at all — the cut, shape, and way it moves all looked more like a cheap nylon costume wig, IMHO.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @03:12PM
blah blah nvidia cool guys blah blah radeon sucks blah blah.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 06 2015, @08:24PM
You apparently didn't read the summary. It doesn't say "radeon sucks" anywhere, Instead it says "NVidia product runs only on NVidia cards. AMD's competing product runs on both AMD and NVidia cards, and even is Open Source".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @07:35AM
Yeah, because that would have been too obvious and unprofessional. You don't want to sound like a retarded fanboy, just a normal one.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VortexCortex on Monday July 06 2015, @06:58PM
Still looks fake. Great feat in rendering/physics optimizations of many lines in 3D, but they still fail to model friction properly. That's why the hair movement still looks "off" even when this slow-mo video is sped up (protip: speed controls are in the gear icon on youtube videos). Compare that video with this live action hair movement video. [youtube.com] Note how the under layers stop moving almost immediately when reaching their destination, while the tips and upper layers still move. That's because her hair strands have cumulative mass due to grouping caused by friction. So, while it's very neat to render a bunch of lines affected by physics, it still doesn't look like hair to me.
Hair shouldn't be swaying back and forth like that underneath layers of other hairs. I'd recommend the devs study actual moving hair a bit more -- sad, since there's a team that does nothing but HairWorks, so you'd think they'd done that... If you did then you'd find that hair is much less computationally expensive since it bundles into locks and almost completely ends motion on contact (when you whip your hair to one side, it doesn't automatically whip back around to the other side like a rubber band). Also, if they move that head the hair shouldn't bounce and sway like so many animated appendages of the FSM. Additionally, wind doesn't blow all the hairs at once. A simple but inaccurate optimization would be to give hair layer with successive physics damping factors so that when force is applied the top most layers continue to propagate the rubber-band physics more than the deeper layers, like real hair does. This would make turning one's head upside down quickly have the hair's under layers falling down slower (which does sort of happen IRL). A better approach is to have hair self-collisions impart the friction factor, but that's far more computationally expensive.
I get that they weren't necessarily modelling wind physics here, but if you're not then what's the point of showing off muh-realism at all? The rendering would be more believable if they stood it on a Van Der Graaf generator, or is promoting an experimental frictionless hair conditioner...
Again, nice work, but they've got a ways to go. I'd stick to rendering locks of hair, since that looks just as good (if not better) than HairWorks, and doesn't require nearly as much GPU (thus allowing the product to reach a greater market share). In other words: The processing cost doesn't pay for itself in terms of realism yet.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 06 2015, @08:19PM
I get only the options "Autoplay", "Anmerkungen" (annotations) and "Qualität" (quality). Nothing about speed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.