Real-Time Hybrid Hair 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.