Fast Simulation of Inextensible Hair and Fur

Abstract

In this short paper we focus on the fast simulation of hair and fur on animated characters. While it is common in films to simulate single hair strands on virtual humans and on furry animals, those features are either not present on characters in computer games or modeled with simplified textured meshes. The main difficulty of simulating hair in real time applications is the sheer number of hair strands and the fact that each hair is inextensible. Keeping thousands of deformable objects from being stretched is computationally expensive. In this paper, we present a robust method for simulating hair and fur that guarantees inextensiblity with a single iteration per frame. For an iteration count this low, existing methods either become unstable or introduce a substantial amount of stretching. Our method is geometric in nature and able to simulate thousands of inextensible hair strands in real time.