Real-Time Hair Rendering with Hair Meshes - SIGGRAPH 2024

Gaurav Bhokare, Eisen Montalvo, Elie Diaz, Cem Yuksel
Real-Time Hair Rendering with Hair Meshes
SIGGRAPH Conference Papers, 2024

Project page: http://cemyuksel.com/research/hairmes...

Hair meshes are known to be effective for modeling and animating hair in computer graphics. We present how the hair mesh structure can be used for efficiently rendering strand-based hair models on the GPU with on-the-fly geometry generation that provides orders of magnitude reduction in storage and memory bandwidth. We use mesh shaders to carefully distribute the computation and a custom texture layout for offloading a part of the computation to the hardware texture units. We also present a set of procedural styling operations to achieve hair strand variations for a wide range of hairstyles and a consistent coordinate-frame generation approach to attach these variations to an animating/deforming hair mesh. Finally, we describe level-of-detail techniques for improving the performance of rendering distant hair models. Our results show an unprecedented level of performance with strand-based hair rendering, achieving hundreds of full hair models animated and rendered at real-time frame rates on a consumer GPU.