Hair Styling: A Teenager's Dream, An Artist's Nightmare

Speakers: Peter Woytiuk

Track: Programming

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: Intermediate

Description: This session discusses the design and implementation of a next-gen hair tool that gives the artist more flexibility in creating various hair styles, be they realistic or more stylized, while substantially reducing iteration time. Creating hair for video games is a time-consuming affair on the art side, where techniques have largely consisted of randomly placing cards, fins and/or ribbons along the skull while fighting with issues such as alpha-sorting and polygon count. We discuss a series of tools designed to work around these issues while still empowering the artist to acheive the style they want in a short amount of time.

Idea Takeaway: Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the issues regarding modeling and rendering of hair styles along with some specific solutions to those issues.

Intended Audience: Technical artists, tools programmers, hirsute fetishists. An understanding of artist workflow or creating art tools is beneficial, as is basic knowledge of modeling and lighting.