Fur rendering?

[Marek]

There's this character in FF: Crystal Chronicles that has real-time fur. As in... it looks all fuzzy and puffy like Sulley from Monsters Inc. I really couldn't believe they could do that in real-time! Are there any other games that feature this truly nifty trick? (Will everyone laugh at me and point out tons of games that have that?)

[BigJKO]

StarFox Adventures had real-time fur, I think.

With the nifty pixel-shader technology I think it's easier for games to do this now. Or was it some other feature of DX9.. I don't remember. Anyway, it hasn't been done a lot, but is definately possible.

[Jake]

[manny_c44]

Yeah ATI made the graphics card for the cube, so it has similar features as the 9600-9800 chip-sets.

[Marek]

WOW it's ... hardly noticable?

Not quite as awesome as the Moogles in FF:CC.

[Marek]

http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/rpg/finalfantasycrystalc/media.html

Gameplay Footage 6 shows the fur ... I didn't know you could do the spraypaint thing! And holy shit... a haircut?! That's hilarious!

[SiN]

black & white 2 has some amazing looking fur effects, but that hasnt been released yet.

SiN

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Yeah, that's exactly the first thing popped in my head when Marek stated he's into hair. Whatever does it for you, Marek.

[Lindset]

This is a demo from when the 8500 was new and fresh. Better fur can be made today utilizing shaders and stuff, but I haven't found any other good demos showcasing fur.

http://www.ati.com/developer/samples/3rdparty/tomohide_fur.03.13.02.zip

Yeah ATI made the graphics card for the cube, so it has similar features as the 9600-9800 chip-sets.

The graphics chipset for the cube was made by ArtX, which was later aquired by ATI. Dave Orton (the current ATI CEO), whom many credit for ATI's turnaround, was with ArtX when they were aquired.

[MrChlorophyll]

Hair it is.

[manny_c44]

Black and White 2 really does look nice, hopefully it won't be a total bust like B&W 1.

Nice demo Lindset, I'd never seen it. I guess fur effects were being used way before the DX9 cards.

[Jayel]

The real time fur effect paper published by microsoft was back in DirectX7 days. (and i'm sure there are more papers that predates it) Virtually all fur in games are based on the same technique. So yeah it's not new.

It's just that the cards weren't fast enough to do it until now.

[shbazjinkens]

I'm under the impression that this is not actually done with polygons, but with defined 3d lines that have a 2d texture that changes shading a bit with the angle.. so it renders faster. I know this is how some hair plugin in 3DSMax works, anyway, and it renders way faster. That would explain why this is now possible while it is still difficult to model characters with no visible (intentional) straight lines or corners. The deformation is only in a simple line and the surface is a very small and simple texture so it works well in realtime.

[Jayel]

I'm under the impression that this is not actually done with polygons, but with defined 3d lines that have a 2d texture that changes shading a bit with the angle.. so it renders faster. I know this is how some hair plugin in 3DSMax works, anyway, and it renders way faster. That would explain why this is now possible while it is still difficult to model characters with no visible (intentional) straight lines or corners. The deformation is only in a simple line and the surface is a very small and simple texture so it works well in realtime.

Rendering individual hair as splines is incredibly expensive. most video cards have hardware support for them, but it's never used for fur (in games).

The way they do it in games is this:

1 draw mesh with base texture

2 expand the entire mesh based on its normal and render second pass with alpha texture as cross sections of individual hair (this would look like a set of dots)

3 repeat step 2 many many times (like, 8)

4 for the next pass, extrude random edges from the mesh as polys and apply alpha fur texture (this would look like grass blades). if the polys are facing the cam, they're opaque. fade otherwise.

of course it's a lot faster if all the geometry is preprocessed and ready to render without having to expand, extrude and reapply texture to polygons.

It seems like a stupid method but nobody has come up with a better idea yet.

[shbazjinkens]

Ah, I've seen that done too but I was under the impression that it would be more computationally expensive than splines.

Guess I learn something new every day..

.. but wouldn't it be cheaper to use translucency and some scattered faces sticking out from the mesh with hair on them? Maybe the bones add up or something? That's how I did the ends of the hair on my last model, I could see it working if you did it all over the body to simulate fur.

[Jayel]

I think what you're describing actually corresponds to step 4 of my previous post. Some games (eg black and white 2, I noticed) skip all previous "base mesh" & "shells" steps and go straight to fins. it seems to work well too, although upon close up it looks rather ugly.

[Lindset]

They're getting somewhere with normal hair too now. Just take a look at the latest nvidia demo (of the mermaid). Well, that was of course underwater... so I have a feeling that they haven't quite figured out how to make it fall naturally yet I may be wrong, though, but there's got to be a reason I haven't seen any good demos of long hair. Short hair is easy to do.

[goldstone]

Shells and fins is the way to go, although it's still expensive (at least it is on my 9800).

The XDK sample with the teddy bear is nice (hairdriers are cool ), but unrealistic with other stuff going on.

Roll on 'next next next gen' consoles.

[Lindset]

Ah! Just remember where I had seen another great fur demo! Go to http://www.microsoft.com/xna/multimedia.aspx and download the Xenomorph video. Looks good. I think it's using the same technique as the previous demo I posted a link to.

The other demos are good too.

[shbazjinkens]

They're getting somewhere with normal hair too now. Just take a look at the latest nvidia demo (of the mermaid). Well, that was of course underwater... so I have a feeling that they haven't quite figured out how to make it fall naturally yet I may be wrong, though, but there's got to be a reason I haven't seen any good demos of long hair. Short hair is easy to do.

Crystal Space (open-source 3d engine) has a demo of a real-time cloth simulator in the download I took. It seemed to work pretty well to me - and could be applied to hair. Forgot all about it until you mentioned that underwater stuff. It works with higher-poly meshes I think, no strands, fins or splines, just a solid mesh that would bend at the edges of the faces.

So, the technology is there, even for real gravity. It may still have problems with collision detecting though, which would explain why it isn't widely seen. It couldn't be used for fur except with fins, probably just useful for cloth and hair.

[Guest James]

its still one of the hardest effects to get entirely right. its only been in more recent CGI films that it's been spot on. black n white also did well for the time.

[shbazjinkens]

I wonder if much experimentation has been done using realtime particles, to get something like this?