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Polygon: Is it actually hard to make textured hair for video games?
- Thread starter IbizaPocholo
- Start date
- Opinion Analysis Trailer
PleaseWaitStation4
Banned
**Polygon.com is not a valid source of gaming news or reviews**
Northeastmonk
Gold Member
I want to see a Agni’s Philosophy type of game and have her hair change position to whatever she’s doing. Sometimes characters feel pretty static, robotic, and you don’t focus on the hair. It sure looks good and those games in the video were also good examples (if not the best examples). I still think there’s some ways to go before they hit that uncanny valley.
J
JeremyEtcetera
Unconfirmed Member
This was actually not a bad video and was decently educational. Hair and mouths still have quite a ways to go before we really nail both.
It’s a good video and informative. Did you just get annoyed because you saw it was about black peoples hair and assumed it was “woke”?
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J
JeremyEtcetera
Unconfirmed Member
Really good full beards also seem to be a weak point for artists. The visual trickery and lighting helps though.
mansoor1980
Gold Member
nvidia hair works is the best one imo
Number one immersion breaker in rdr2. They did so well with the faces but if you let Arthur’s beard grow too long he looked years worse tech wise.
J
JeremyEtcetera
Unconfirmed Member
ManaByte
Gold Member
J
JeremyEtcetera
Unconfirmed Member
It's not only about how it moves. It's about how it looks. There's still a very flat-ish and polygonal look to a lot of hair in games today.
Lol it's gonna be easy to tell who didn't watch the video.
Insomniacs done great work. I understand why textured/black hair was ignored more or less because of poly budget/tech difficulties. Metahuman and other spline based hair rendering techniques should allow for easier asset creation hopefully
Insomniacs done great work. I understand why textured/black hair was ignored more or less because of poly budget/tech difficulties. Metahuman and other spline based hair rendering techniques should allow for easier asset creation hopefully
Kuranghi
Member
The main thing that gets me is the swinging the view about like a drunkard part of it, I can just see a mental image of the way the person moved the sticks and its basically the same as my 6-year-old niece did... for 45 minutes before she got the hang of it.
I know someone people will always be "stick flickers" and thats how they do it (I generally keep my finger on the stick if I can but flicking is essential sometimes too ofc) but theres a difference between that and this holding the stick to the left or right or whatever for 1 second or more and overshooting the target by that much.
I suppose its just like maddo drivers you see IRL who oversteer and move the car around like a bowl of jelly, just a gaming version. Less terrifying from a safety perspective, although still not great when its your job to give impressions of computer games.
nemiroff
Gold Member
It's not complicated. Polygon is a garbage site run by garbage people. Simple as that.
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy
Member
If there’s anything the PS4/X1 generation made a significant improvement on, I would say it was hair. Some early games it was nice to see more extensive hair physics in games like Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, even if it’s just a small detail.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
It was a great video. Very educational.
jonnyp
Member
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
This was a great video.
Matsuchezz
Member
Hair tech is good for cutscenes and close ups, it adds nothing to gameplay. Certainly it adds to immersion but just a little bit. I rather have more advancements in lip-synch and animation to the face and bodies and leave hair at last.
A big focus of the video is that it's not just about cutscenes and close-ups, but character creation. I would say character creation in RPGs is a big part of the initial gameplay and matters a lot to people. There's a subset of people (black people, curly haired, etc) that haven't been able to get hairstyles for their characters that look like them, so it ruins the experience and immersion. Tech artists can work on all of the above and the tech continues to improve
J
JeremyEtcetera
Unconfirmed Member
I mean yea, and so is IGN, but if they decide to do more informative and educational content like this then that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Then again I'm also the type to separate good music from a questionable/shitty artist.
J
JeremyEtcetera
Unconfirmed Member
Balducci30
Member
Huh I didn’t know that’s how they did hair - so will there be a point where it literally renders the individual strands? Or is that what the spline stuff basically is
It’s a good video. Others that bothered watching it agree. Simple as that.
Arcadialane
Member
VFXVeteran
Banned
I've developed hair rendering shaders and worked with hair artists for years in the film space. We are really really far away from getting a good solution for hair. Here's 2 main reasons:
1) Not enough triangles are being rendered. Let's face it, in order for hair to look really good, it needs way more triangles than what's being done now. If you guys are impressed with Nanite, just imagine how many triangles consists of a fur'ed animal like Lion King in CG.
2) Here is what I think game devs should focus on the most. We can deal with less triangles but the shading and lighting of hair is EXTREMELY poor. Not only are they still using 2 specular lobes for hair with the simplest scattering function, but no hair is being lit by global illumination and self-shadowing ambient occlusion. Film is used to 4 specular lobes that includes the translucent pass and a diffuse layer on top of getting shadows from light sources and then getting self-shadows from global illumination.
Hair is very difficult and it's one of the most taxing features in both games and film.
1) Not enough triangles are being rendered. Let's face it, in order for hair to look really good, it needs way more triangles than what's being done now. If you guys are impressed with Nanite, just imagine how many triangles consists of a fur'ed animal like Lion King in CG.
2) Here is what I think game devs should focus on the most. We can deal with less triangles but the shading and lighting of hair is EXTREMELY poor. Not only are they still using 2 specular lobes for hair with the simplest scattering function, but no hair is being lit by global illumination and self-shadowing ambient occlusion. Film is used to 4 specular lobes that includes the translucent pass and a diffuse layer on top of getting shadows from light sources and then getting self-shadows from global illumination.
Hair is very difficult and it's one of the most taxing features in both games and film.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
Actually yes it is hard, hair is possible these days mostly through shaders that just don’t draw transparent pixels on a textures. That is because z sorting transparencies for multiple overlapping objects on one center is nearly impossible. So any non-straight hair would have to either be some sort of shader or many overlapping polygons to create a viable effect.
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kiphalfton
Member
The wookies in Star Wars the Fallen Order looked like sea monsters. Meanwhile the main characters hair looked pretty good.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
My favorite shampoo commercial
AMSCD
Member
Have you ever considered that you might be a garbage user? Just food for thought.
JerryinSoCal
Member
It's funny if you go back to fight night on the 360 characters with short tight haircuts or short curly hair had very realistic looking hair but characters with longer straight hair looked terrible. Now we've gotten to a point where the short curly hair looks real and the straight hair looks better but still not always great. One problem I see is that we've gone from helmet hair that doesn't move in old games to hair now that moves too much. The hair doesn't move subtly like in real life but instead bounces too much and to big, it's almost like they'd rather make sure you see that the hair moves vs just nice small subtle movements that look far more realistic.
nemiroff
Gold Member
Yes. But I don't get my own thread for some reason.. Might be because Polygon is a public company with public urinalists, and I'm not.
IbizaPocholo
NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
IFireflyl
Gold Member
I completely misread that and thought it said, "We Need to Fix Back Hair in Video Games."
I think there issue is with Polygon.com not black people.