Hair is surprisingly difficult to make for video game developers, but an animation demo made in Unreal Engine 4 released last week shows how far the industry's tech has come toward getting it right, and highlights the lifelike visuals that the upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, along with modern PCs, could bring to the table very soon.
With the next generation of consoles on the way and a rapidly evolving graphics card market on PC, big changes are on the way for the way future titles will be made to take advantage of the latest and greatest hardware. Opinions are split on whether the new PlayStation and Xbox models will significantly improve graphical fidelity over well-equipped PCs and higher-end consoles like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, but strides are still being made in some of the smaller areas of modeling renders for CGI-powered movies and video games, both in real-time and in pre-rendered cutscenes.
Hair in computer graphics has been tough to get right since the early days of the industry, with modelers and animators having to place and move thousands of individual strands on just one character's head, and graphics hardware rendering it all in real time on players' consoles and PCs. The Unreal Engine demo, shared with FX Guide by Epic Games engineer Charles de Rousiers, is remarkably convincing, and the associated tech is already on the way for developers to use in their own UE4 projects.
Animator and author Jonathan Cooper tweeted about the possibilities Thursday, expressing his excitement for how detailed fighting games could render characters' hairstyles and similar features in 3D, as the two character limit allows developers to render fighters with a high amount of fidelity. Cooper, whose previous work includes animation on The Last of Us and the Assassin's Creed series, specifically pointed to Street Fighter's Ken as an example of a character who could benefit from the tech.
Similarly to how ray tracing can completely alter a game's look, seemingly small advancements like hair modeling can go a long way in moving games toward both photorealism and impressively stylized aesthetics, even if they're hard to picture in a controlled environment like a demo. As more developers acclimate themselves to the tech and begin using it for their own characters and projects, the benefits will become self-evident with time.
Source: FX Guide