University of California, San Diego today announced a new method for accurately capturing the shape and appearance of a person’s hairstyle. The results closely match the real hairstyles and can be used for animation. This level of realism for animated hairstyles is one step closer to the silver screen, thanks to new research being presented at SIGGRAPH, one of the most competitive computer graphics conferences in the world. The breakthrough is a collaboration between researchers at UC San Diego, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The computer graphics researchers captured the shape and appearance of hairstyles of real people using multiple cameras, light sources and projectors. The computer scientists then created algorithms to ‘fill in the blanks’ and generate photo-realistic images of the hairstyles from new angles and new lighting situations.
From here, the computer scientists found a new way to precisely simulate how light would reflect off each strand of hair. The result is the ability to create photo-realistic images of the hairstyle from any angle. The automated system even creates realistic highlights. This process of creating new images based on data from related images is called interpolation. By determining the orientations of individual hairs, the researchers can realistically estimate how the hairstyle will shine no matter what angle the light is coming from. The new computational approach can be used for much more than generating images of a hairstyle based on what the style looks like from other angles. One possible extension of this work: making an animated character’s hair realistically blow in the wind. This could be done because the researchers also developed a way to calculate what each individual hair fiber that lies between the surface and the scalp is doing.
More information:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080813095716.htm
More information:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080813095716.htm