Real-time Hybrid Hair Rendering

Erik S. V. Jansson¹, Matthäus G. Chajdas², Jason Lacroix², Ingemar Ragnemalm¹

Image showing two hair models, one of a pony tail, one of a bear. — Hair models rendered using our technique. The left half is directly rasterized, the right half of each mesh runs through our ray-marcher. Hair count is 136.320 hair strands for the head, and 961.280 for the bear, respectively.

Accepted to EGSR 2019, the 30th Eurographics Symposium on Rendering

Abstract

Rendering hair is a challenging problem for real-time applications. Besides complex shading, the sheer amount of it poses a lot of problems, as a human scalp can have over 100,000 strands of hair, with animal fur often surpassing a million. For rendering,both strand-based and volume-based techniques have been used, but usually in isolation. In this work, we present a complete hair rendering solution based on a hybrid approach. The solution requires no pre-processing, making it a drop-in replacement,that combines the best of strand-based and volume-based rendering. Our approach uses this volume not only as a level-of-detail representation that is raymarched directly, but also to simulate global effects, like shadows and ambient occlusion in real-time.

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Bibtex

@inproceedings {
    JCLR2019,
    booktitle = {Eurographics Symposium on Rendering - DL-only and Industry Track},
    editor = {Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep},
    title = {{Real-Time Hybrid Hair Rendering}},
    author = {Jansson, Erik Sven Vasconcelos and Chajdas, Matthäus G. and Lacroix, Jason and Ragnemalm, Ingemar},
    year = {2019},
    publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
    ISSN = {1727-3463},
    ISBN = {978-3-03868-095-6},
    DOI = {10.2312/sr.20191215}
}