NVIDIA Shakes Its Flowing Mane With Life-Like HairWorks 1.1 Demo 61
MojoKid writes: Previously, you might not have thought much about a wig on a manikin, but checking out NVIDIA's latest tech demo, as a gamer or 3D graphics artists, hair can be pretty interesting. The video is of NVIDIA HairWorks 1.1, a simulation and rendering tool for creating lifelike hair and fur in video games. In the clip, NVIDIA shows off a Fabio-style hairdo with about 500,000 hairs that bounce and sway as the camera circles and forces move the hair. If this was a real wig, it might unseat one of the most boring videos ever. However, as an example of what modern 3D graphics can do with hair physics, it's pretty darn cool. Previous demos of HairWorks showed up to 22,000 strands of hair, making the jump to half a million much much more significant. The video was recorded with ShadowPlay on a GeForce GTX 980, which has some serious muscle, though it's not the most powerful card in NVIDIA's lineup. What's cooler than making life-like human hair? Putting flowing manes on vicious monsters, of course. Apparently, NVIDIA HairWorks simulation technology also plays a role in bringing more than a dozen creatures to life in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
LOL ... (Score:2)
Bastards ... now I can't get this [youtube.com] out of my head!!
Re:LOL ... (Score:4, Informative)
Jesus... you could've spared the rest of us, though!
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I was thinking more along the lines of Shrek's Prince Charming Hair Flip [youtube.com] ...
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FINALLY. Now we can add female characters to video games.
Up til now, it wasn't possible, because the graphics just weren't good enough to to represent them. Males can be represented by a square colored block, but you need hyper-accurate hair for females.
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Ah, but just think about it ... hook this puppy up to your webcam, and you can stare at yourself with flowing locks.
It'll be like the Mirror of Erised [wikia.com] from Harry Potter. People will just wile away their lives basking in the glory of having Fabio hair.
Re:Shaking my big bald head (Score:5, Funny)
I can look in a real mirror if I want to see myself with flowing locks... I am frequently called Fabio and women in bars that I don't know and sometimes are there with a jealous boyfriends or husbands want to play with my hair.
Although it doesn't always work out that well. Once my brother and I went to the store to pick up some stuff to BBQ and his mother in-law saw us in the car. She called his wife and told her that she had seen her husband driving with a skinny blond bimbo.
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The greatest thing about not going bald at my age is that the women love to play with my hair. I keep it long just because I am a pervert. Also, I like my hair. Also, it does not look a damned thing like that picture in the article. No, I did not read the article (I am no heretic) but I did open it to see if there were pictures.
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My wife went and got her hair cut in a short bob once although I didn't say it she could tell I didn't like it. At the time I had a fairly short haircut and she told me "It's longer than your hair and will always be longer." Wrong move, I let my hair grow out and it's been an on going joke for the past 8-9 years.
You Insensitive Clod! (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us would be happy just to have bald spots rendered properly.
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So sad you grew up on 90s pr0n, otherwise you'd know pubes don't really flow, they're rather static
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The GTX 980 is about $400, not $1,250. But otherwise, yeah.
Demo is Nice. Game Footage is Not. (Score:1)
In the demo videos they have the fabio hair which looks pretty cool. The hair blurs a bit when it is in motion, but it still looks pretty good. Unfortunately the video game footage from farcry isn't nearly as slick. The change from a nicely rendered texture map to the hair is like the difference between fairly believable animals to animal drawings that were smudged by an eraser. This may be a case of what happens when just a little bit of the computational resources are used (with the rest to scene rend
Re:Demo is Nice. Game Footage is Not. (Score:4, Informative)
The hair blurs a bit when it is in motion,
Yeah, due to the video compression.
Daily HH Spam Article... (Score:2)
e_e (Score:2)
I'm shaking my head already at this headline.
Not what I want (Score:2)
I'd like to see them try to render anime-style hairs instead. I've never seen it done perfectly, but this seems powerful enough to at least try.
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FF7's getting a remake, they should get in on that.
With this technology, (Score:2)
Fallout 4 needs wooly deathclaws.
Just sayin'.
Which .... (Score:2)
Only runs on software with an ATI card for some reason even though the support Tressfx
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Just like the poor SSE performance the AMD CPUs get on intel compiler binaries, right?
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Wrong under ATI hairworks ran on software and untouched the hardware.
Also NVidia made it so the program can't be debugged to prevent ATI from reverse engineering it which they had to do to trick the .dlls to make it run on hardware.
ATI has excellent performance and that tool is designed to make it and older NVidia chips look bad on purpose to drive revenue.
Go home NVidia (Score:3)
You are drunk!
This is cool and all, but having seen hairworks in real games now, it looks better when it is turned off.
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I agree entirely. I play at 2k with a pair of SLI'd 970's, and have been playing Witcher 3 lately. The hair looks phenomenal with hairworks OFF, looks like ass with it on, regardless of graphics settings.
My idea for HairWorks 2.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct Intent, Wrong Target (Score:1)
Males care more about boob physics than hair physics. OMG, hairy boobs are about to become the new black!
I might care... (Score:2)
If it wasn't vendor locked to only work on their own hardware. The gaming industry needs to reform itself and stop taking bribes from hardware vendors to use vendor specific code that is perfectly capable of running on other vendors' hardware.
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Not lifelike: real humans have 100k, not 500k hair (Score:2)
Dirty hairs (Score:4, Interesting)
Still using guide hairs (Score:2, Interesting)
The simulation still uses guide hairs. You can still recognize the hair strands following the individual guides around. This is one of the most prevalent artefacts of hair simulations to date and I'm a bit disappointed that it's that obvious in the demo. However, they do seem to render each hair seperately, which is a lot of effert and potentially a ton of overdraw. And they need to do some kind of dynamic depth sorting - probably per pixel. That's where it actually gets impressive.
Powered by brains (Score:1)
I think we know what nVidia is using to to power [slashdot.org] it
Not quite there yet... (Score:5, Funny)
I mean you have to expect some dandruff and loose hairs falling off during such extreme movement.
GameWorks, great another Windows service (Score:2)
I run Nvidia software, it installs 5 services, 4 of which I have disabled; only the Display Driver service runs. I don't play games in 3D, stream video any game servers, or need to be told when to update my drivers. I also don't need my graphic card settings changed at the whim of a program (service).
Now GameWorks is shown, which would be service when/if released. Much like their Physics engine (PhysX) that I've never known a game or application I've used use.
The PhysX directory is not only the first direct
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The PhysX directory is not only the first directory in ones Windows Path.
Should of added to view ones path open a CMD window and type in PATH or SET.
What's cooler than making life-like human hair? (Score:2)
Almost everything.
Oh, you mean like (Score:2)
TressFX that AMD came out with a year ago and isn't locked to just AMD cards?