FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

We Got a Glimpse of 'PureHair,' the Latest and Greatest Hair in Video Games

Eidos Montreal and AMD teamed up on a new way to make hair look realistic.
The TRESSFX hair engine in action. From August 2014. Source:  ​YouTube

Video games woke up with a bad hair day with the advent of 3D in the '90s and they haven't recovered since. They've made huge progress with faces, animation, lighting, and other areas, but hair, especially human head hair, is still a mess. It sits on a character's head like a thick plastic mold, or wispy toupees that make Donald Trump look like shampoo commercial model.

Eidos Montreal, developer of the first-person cyberpunk adventure game Deus Ex, and AMD, maker of the TRESSFX 3.0 hair engine, say they're making strides.

Advertisement

TRESSFX was first used in the 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, making Lara Croft's ponytail bounce lushly as she jumped over cliffs and pumped shotguns.

PureHair, a new hair solution made in collaboration between AMD and Eidos Montreal's research and development lab, improves upon TRESSFX. We won't get to see it in game until Deus Ex Universe is released, but at Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco today, Eidos' Uriel Doyon shared what their investigation into the best hair technology found so far.

A glimpse of the PureHair engine at GDC. Image: Emanuel Maiberg

Generally speaking, Doyad said, there are three basic components that go into rendering realistic looking hair. Working from the scalp out, first are textures, 2D images painted onto the 3D models head. Alone, textures can only approximate a buzz cut, but they also help fill in the gaps for other methods. Next are hair meshes, which gives the hair its overall shape. You can think of it like the cut. Finally, there are the individual strands. These are the biggest obstacle, as rendering the movement and lighting for each stand—sometimes there are more than 22,000 on a single character— is incredibly taxing on consumer-grade computer hardware.

One innovation that Eidos Montreal's R&D has made is its "master and slave" strand system. Rather than simulating the physics for each individual strand, it simulates a few master strands, which nearby strands automatically follow, making it significantly easier to compute.

Advertisement

This solution also poses its own unique challenges. If the master slave system isn't implemented correctly, it can result in what Doyon called "the dreadlock effect," which will cause the slave strands to clamp around the master and form one big tangled mess.

Eidos' investigation also discovered that hair translucency is the most important part to get right for realistic hair. If hair strands don't have varying degrees of translucency, each hair looks exactly the same and completely opaque. It makes strands look too big, kind of like someone dropped a pot of spaghetti on your head, and it doesn't yield the highlights and volume that make hair developers are looking for.

More from the PureHair engine. Image: Emanuel Maiberg

Doyod played a short video showing off PureHair in action, a loop of a faceless 3D model prancing around in high heels, and while it did look better than most video game hair I've seen, it's far from what I'd call realistic.

It works better for short, spiky hair—the kind that with enough gel makes you look like a plastic video game character anyway. With long, swaying hair, it still seems a little stiff, with too few and too thick strands instead of thousands of delicate moving parts.

It's certainly progress, but it doesn't look like any hairstyle I've seen.

Maybe a jheri curl.