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NVIDIA Shakes Its Flowing Mane With Life-Like HairWorks 1.1 Demo
MojoKid writes: Previously, you might not have thought much about a wig on a manikin, but checking out NVIDIA's latest tech demo, as a gamer or 3D graphics artists, hair can be pretty interesting. The video is of NVIDIA HairWorks 1.1, a simulation and rendering tool for creating lifelike hair and fur in video games. In the clip, NVIDIA shows off a Fabio-style hairdo with about 500,000 hairs that bounce and sway as the camera circles and forces move the hair. If this was a real wig, it might unseat one of the most boring videos ever. However, as an example of what modern 3D graphics can do with hair physics, it's pretty darn cool. Previous demos of HairWorks showed up to 22,000 strands of hair, making the jump to half a million much much more significant. The video was recorded with ShadowPlay on a GeForce GTX 980, which has some serious muscle, though it's not the most powerful card in NVIDIA's lineup. What's cooler than making life-like human hair? Putting flowing manes on vicious monsters, of course. Apparently, NVIDIA HairWorks simulation technology also plays a role in bringing more than a dozen creatures to life in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Bastards ... now I can't get this out of my head!!
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Shaking my big bald head
Some of us would be happy just to have bald spots rendered properly.
Have gnu, will travel.
Unless you've got a beast of a computer, it's not worth the slowdown. How about Nvidia get 22k strands of hair running smoothly on midrange cards first before they jump to 500k?
Soon, you can have realistic floppying dongs with beautify pubic hair (fuck you shavers and pedophiles) flopping on your screen for the low cost of a $1250 gfx card.
In the demo videos they have the fabio hair which looks pretty cool. The hair blurs a bit when it is in motion, but it still looks pretty good. Unfortunately the video game footage from farcry isn't nearly as slick. The change from a nicely rendered texture map to the hair is like the difference between fairly believable animals to animal drawings that were smudged by an eraser. This may be a case of what happens when just a little bit of the computational resources are used (with the rest to scene rending) vs all of the computational resources. Judging from their demo it is currently a net negative in games. In 10 years when we can get the same quality of the stand alone demo with just a fraction of a 100 TFLOP GPU it will be pretty awesome.
Please stop.
...that the physics is entirely wrong and the acceleration due to gravity is off.
Whatever they were using it was under-powered too.
I'm shaking my head already at this headline.
The hair blurs a bit when it is in motion,
Yeah, due to the video compression.
I'd like to see them try to render anime-style hairs instead. I've never seen it done perfectly, but this seems powerful enough to at least try.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
This tech would have been great to model James May in a convertible.
Fallout 4 needs wooly deathclaws.
Just sayin'.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Only runs on software with an ATI card for some reason even though the support Tressfx
http://saveie6.com/
too bad they insist that their realistic video runs in slow-mo :P
You are drunk!
This is cool and all, but having seen hairworks in real games now, it looks better when it is turned off.
long flowing hair belongs on a female; I'm offended that a male model was used.
I think for HairWorks 2.0, they should simulate that beautiful mane getting tangled, because we all know you don't have much time for hair care when you're fighting orcs or dungeon creatures.
I was combing through Slashdot articles when I found this. I came here manely for the good articles, not this flaky stuff. But I wigged out when I saw this. I'm glad reading Slashdot doesn't cost anything, because toupee for this kind of story would be a waste of money. I would be telling a bald-faced lie if I said this was a good article. Slashdot should try to stay Head & Shoulders above the competition and avoid this kind of fluff. So I'm just going to brush this off and move on now.
Males care more about boob physics than hair physics. OMG, hairy boobs are about to become the new black!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
If it wasn't vendor locked to only work on their own hardware. The gaming industry needs to reform itself and stop taking bribes from hardware vendors to use vendor specific code that is perfectly capable of running on other vendors' hardware.
That would mean there is a whole lot more compression in the demo video than in the video game footage. I think the blur is a processing crutch like distance fog and that crutch is needed more when the gpu is handling a whole game vs just hair.
NVIDIA fails basic physiology. A human only has a fraction of the half million hairs on this model.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
You insensitive clod! I have 100k hairs on my back alone!
Now can they do dirty hairs dynamics?
Blur on a GPU is always more work, not less. You'd need a very decent speedup somewhere else for this to be a net gain. I'm not watching the video again, but I am pretty sure that what you're seeing is video compression.
The simulation still uses guide hairs. You can still recognize the hair strands following the individual guides around. This is one of the most prevalent artefacts of hair simulations to date and I'm a bit disappointed that it's that obvious in the demo. However, they do seem to render each hair seperately, which is a lot of effert and potentially a ton of overdraw. And they need to do some kind of dynamic depth sorting - probably per pixel. That's where it actually gets impressive.
I think we know what nVidia is using to to power it
I mean you have to expect some dandruff and loose hairs falling off during such extreme movement.
I only care about hair physics if the hair is flowing over some boob physics (women's or men's)
so nvidia is the brand to get for the next big hairdressor tycoon game.
yay !
I run Nvidia software, it installs 5 services, 4 of which I have disabled; only the Display Driver service runs. I don't play games in 3D, stream video any game servers, or need to be told when to update my drivers. I also don't need my graphic card settings changed at the whim of a program (service).
Now GameWorks is shown, which would be service when/if released. Much like their Physics engine (PhysX) that I've never known a game or application I've used use.
The PhysX directory is not only the first directory in ones Windows Path, if you remove it or place it to the end it fixes the "error". Meaning that directory is checked first for any application (.exe), .dll, .bat, .cmd or anything called. Yes you can speed up your Windows OS drive by putting that directory at the end of the Path, mayhaps not by that much but every little bit helps.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common" is the path and one of those services I have disabled does stop the "error" from being found, replacing it at the beginning of the path. I disable them all after a driver update so not sure which; but Nvidia Geforce Experience Service sure seems a good bet.
And I do play games when I can, Battle Field 3 (all high or max video settings) still a favorite.
More interesting is actually the cloth simulation.
Not to diminish their work, but having 2 or 3 layers of cloth, correctly reacting to gravity and body accelerations, and not interfere each other might interesting.
Of course NVIDIA picked this subject because they can use the graphic card parallel threads to simulate a large number of hair follicle.
Almost everything.
http://www.dailypress.com/entertainment/blog/dp-popcorn-fabio-goose-0814-story.html
TressFX that AMD came out with a year ago and isn't locked to just AMD cards?
If Donald T. RUMP's hair were more lifelike, his Mexican bashing and immigrant hating might go over better. Perhaps NVIDIA could develop CombOverWorks 1.1 next!