Computer-generated Images: Hollywood Hair Will Be Captured At Last

From ScienceDaily: Latest Science News:

Imagine avatars of your favorite actors wandering through 3-D virtual worlds with hair that looks almost exactly like it does in real life. 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 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. Adobe researcher and SIGGRAPH paper author Sylvain Paris explained that replicating hairstyles for every possible angle and then getting individual strands of hair to realistically shine in the sun and blow in the wind would be extremely difficult and time consuming for digital artists to do manually. "We want to give movie and video game makers the tools necessary to animate actors and have their hair look and behave as it would in the real world," said UC San Diego computer science professor Matthias Zwicker, also a SIGGRAPH paper author.

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