Real-time Hair Simulation with Efficient Hair Style Preservation

Abstract

Hair can be a prominent feature of characters in real-time games. In this paper, we propose hair simulation with efficient preservation of various hair styles. Bending and twisting effects are crucial to simulate curly or wavy hair. We propose local and global shape constraints and parallel methods to update local and global transforms to find goal positions. All three methods show good visual quality and take only a small fraction of rendering time. This simulation runs on the GPU and works smoothly as a part of rendering pipeline. Simulating around 20,000 strands composed of total 0.22 million vertices takes less than 1 millisecond. Simulation parameters such as stiffness or number of iterations for shape constraints can be manipulated by users interactively. It helps designers choose the right parameters for various hair styles and conditions. Also the simulation can handle various situations interactively.