Movie studios often want computer-generated hair to have a specific effect, whether it’s a seductive toss or a careless flick that knocks something over. But there’s a problem: most rough-cut simulations don’t realistically simulate hair, leading to a lot of guesswork and time-consuming edits. Disney (no stranger to hair-centric movies) has a solution, though. It developed a new system that can produce more authentic-looking simulations without an impractical boost to computation power. The trick, it turns out, was to use just a few cleverly controlled sample hairs. The team first extracted central “guide” hairs to use for complex simulations, with the remaining “detail” hair following suit under one main rule: the centers of mass for each subset of detail hair had to maintain their positions relative to dynamic reference points on the guide hairs. Read more
Disney reduces the chances of CG hair disasters (Engadget)
