A reduced model for interactive hairs

Abstract

Realistic hair animation is a crucial component in depicting virtual characters in interactive applications. While much progress has been made in high-quality hair simulation, the overwhelming computation cost hinders similar fidelity in realtime simulations. To bridge this gap, we propose a data-driven solution. Building upon precomputed simulation data, our approach constructs a reduced model to optimally represent hair motion characteristics with a small number of guide hairs and the corresponding interpolation relationships. At runtime, utilizing such a reduced model, we only simulate guide hairs that capture the general hair motion and interpolate all rest strands. We further propose a hair correction method that corrects the resulting hair motion with a position-based model to resolve hair collisions and thus captures motion details. Our hair simulation method enables a simulation of a full head of hairs with over 150K strands in realtime. We demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our method with various hairstyles and driven motions (e.g., head movement and wind force), and compared against full simulation results that does not appear in the training data.