GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Chapter 23. Hair Animation and Rendering in the Nalu Demo

Hubert NguyenNVIDIA Corporation

William DonnellyNVIDIA Corporation

The single largest technical challenge we faced in developing the Nalu demo for the GeForce 6800 launch was the rendering of realistic hair in real time. Previous NVIDIA demo characters Dawn and Dusk had hair, but it was short, dark, and static. For Nalu, we set out to achieve the goal of rendering long, blonde, flowing hair underwater. In this chapter we describe the techniques we used to achieve this goal in real time. They include a system for simulating the hair’s movement, a shadowing algorithm to compute hair self-shadowing, and a reflectance model to simulate light scattering through individual strands of hair. When ...