LogInCem Yuksel, Computer Graphics Professor at the University of Utah, has announced an impressive, if not astonishing, achievement for real-time hair rendering. The new method achieved by his team can efficiently render strand-based hair models on the GPU, resulting in a significant reduction in storage and memory bandwidth.
In the article introducing the project, a GIF at the top shows that their technique can render a scene with 100 characters, each with a unique hair model comprised of 100,000 strands, in just 2 milliseconds on an NVIDIA GTX 4090 GPU, using a mere 1.7 MB of storage for all the models.
Before this big reveal, game developers knew what a headache real-time hair rendering is. It's a tough challenge to simulate those thousands, if not millions, of individual hair strands and all their unique lighting and shading quirks. However, it is important to present a realistic effect for players, as it enhances visual realism, immersion, and overall game visual fidelity.
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