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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: 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!