Not long ago we talked about the limitations that many games suffer when rendering their characters' skin, and the impressive work developed by the University of Southern California. But virtual skin is not the only thing trapped in that dilemma. Hair is usually a poor accumulation of pixels that barely imitate a hairstyle, subtracting realism. Part of the solution came thanks to Nvidia's HairWorks system, and in its version 1.1, it can simulate approximately 500,000 hairs.
It is likely that the stylists of the future won't need to experiment with volunteers willing to lose their hair. An Oculus Rift, the right dose of software, virtual scissors, and cut away. Digital hair is one of the first things that fans of many games modify through mods. In general, the basic hair options don't look good at all, ruining the 'image' that each player has planned for their character. Fortunately, the two main graphics card manufacturers, AMD and Nvidia offer their own solutions. AMD has on its side TressFX, a system we've already seen making its mark in games like Tomb Raider. Another very interesting aspect of TressFX is its open-source profile, which should allow its portability to different platforms.
A completely different vision is what Nvidia proposes with its HairWorks. It is super proprietary, so it only works on the company's hardware (something that generates increasing displeasure in the community), but recently it has taken a chilling leap in quality. If we already thought its performance in The Witcher 3 was fabulous (it makes you want to ask Geralt for his shampoo and conditioner), added to the demos of early versions with 22,000 hairs, this new presentation based on build 1.1 sweeps away everything before it. The model in question has about 500,000 hairs on its head, and they are not exactly short, to say the least. The idea of calculating movement and volume for all that hair is a bit scary, but Nvidia used a GeForce GTX 980, which, although it belongs to its high-end graphics cards, is not the most powerful on the market.
With the passage of time and many hours of Skyrim on my shoulders, I learned that if you get distracted looking at graphic details, the dragon will introduce a fireball where the sun doesn't shine. However, it is impossible not to recognize the aesthetic advance that Nvidia has achieved with HairWorks 1.1. Which will be the next game to adopt it? Honestly, we have no idea. As I said above, its reception was good in The Witcher 3, and many other players saw that same hair in action with the wild animals of Far Cry 4. The situation can only improve.
