An enhanced framework for real-time hair animation

Maximizing visual effect is a major problem in real-time animation. A real-time hair animation framework was proposed previously by C. K. Koh and Z. Huang (2000, 2001) based on 2D representation and texture mapping. One problem is that it lacks of the volumetric effect due to its 2D nature. This paper presents a technique using the U-shape strip to solve the problem.

1. Introduction

Maximizing visual effect is a major problem in realtime animation. Koh and Huang have presented a strip based framework that is suitable for real-time applications [9], [10]. The main idea is to model and animate hair in 2D strips. Each hair strip, modeled by one patch of parametric surfaces in particular NURBS, represents a group of hair strands. A variety of shapes may be defined for each strip. For the rendering, alpha-mapping is applied on the tessellated polygons to achieve a realistic visual effect. The method has achieved real-time with a good visual effect. However, due to the 2D nature, it lacks of the volumetric effect as the real hair. A straightforward solution is to increase the number of strips. However, it will slow down the animation.