| StarOcean said: Is hair really that hard to do for games? I've noticed hair in pretty much every game looks like layered paper  |
Hair is VERY hard to render. I ran the "Dawn" NVIDIA tech demo on my machine which renders the most "realistic" (I put that in quotes because it STILL isn't) hair I've seen in realtime, and to get the individual strands right even when grouped to ease the physics calculations is just WAY beyond the power current machines have in their GPUs WHILE running everything else in a frame/scene.
The best hair we're going to have is still going to be pre-rendered since all the calculations needed can be done over the course of the 10-15 hours of rendering time for a scene. But realistic-looking realtime hair physics calculations in a gaming environment are a LONG way off!
So far, the best we have outside of tech demos for hair in realtime is NVIDIA Hairworks used in both The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, and both demonstrate a VERY low population of hair strands compared to a more realistic head of hair. Uncharted 4 seems to be using more "stiff" but realistic hair population, and yet......
It's going to be awhile before we can apply shaders for sheen and opacity on, say, hundreds of strands of hair each individually having physics calculations for environmental impact/movement with objects INCLUDING each other!
