Expressive rendering of animated hair

National audienceHair simulation is one of the crucial elements of a character realism in video games as well as animated movies. It is also one of the most challenging because of its complex nature. A simulation model needs to be able to handle hair fibers or wisp interaction while keeping the desired rendering style. During the past few years intensive work has been done in this field. Most of the authors have tried to render and animate hair as realistically as possible. Impressive results have been obtained and computation times have been reduced. Nevertheless this level of realism is not always desired by the animator. Most animated characters are represented with a hair model only composed of a few hair wisps or clumps in other words the individual hair fibers are not even accounted for. Only little work has been done to animate and render non-photorealistic hair for cel-characters1 . The goal of this work is to design an expressive rendering technique for a realistic animation of hair. This project is a part of an ANR research program for a joint industrial project with two production studios: Neomis Animation and BeeLight, two other INRIA project-teams: Bipop and Evasion and a CNRS lab (Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert de l'Université Pierre et Marie Curie). The aim of this project is to provide hair rendering and animating tools for movie making. According to the discussions we had with artists from Neomis studio, it appears that an animator will expect realism of hair motion combined with an expressive rendering technique that is dedicated to animated movies

Usage Based Materials by Simulating Layered Imperfections

Maintaining the ability to make quick iterations is very important to any artist in Computer Graphics, which is not always easy for simulating realistic materials based on how they are used. This thesis will examine imperfections in materials and the way different imperfections interact with each other based on how they are used. A new system will be created to save artist time by simulating how imperfections are layered and positioned