An Analysis of Real-time Rendering and Simulation of Hair and Fur

1 “Real-time simulation of fur is a key element in many virtual reality applications. However, It is still difficult to simulate effects of fur animation in real-time...[the authors‟ are proposing] an interactive fur simulation method, to calculate effects of external forces...and direct manipulation for real-time interactive animation. [The Method, their solution to the difficulties surrounding effects simulation on fur in real time,] “consists of two layered textures for rendering...[The first] represents volumes of fur...[The second] covers and laps the edge [of the first]....” “Each layer is based on the Shell and Fin method.” “Shell is a structure to visualize the volume of fur...[consisting of] several lapped textures with controlled opacity. A fin structure...[fills] gaps among lapped textures...[filling in] holes in the Shell structures... [And] providing more precise representation of fur because its size is small and used for detailed representation.” “ [The authors‟] approach unifies these two structures using a shared vertex array to enhance rendering performance.” “The proposed system creates the mesh data of Shell and Fin based on a base mesh...[then uses an algorithm and 6-step method] to generate the shared vertices of fur with Shell and Fin structure.” “After the generation of the shared vertices, the proposed system creates faces of Fins and Shells that are connected through shared vertices...in the process of creating Shell faces, the system recreates the same number of faces in the base mesh...Faces of Fins are created by connecting neighbor vertices...[and] all of [the] faces are created after the iteration of these operations in all vertices.” “After the creation of Shell and Fin faces, a texture is generated to represent the shape of furs on Shells. The proposed method creates random Shell textures using a seed value...we utilize the seed value as a growing vector to represent the random direction of each fur strand...in addition, the proposed system can be customized, as it allows a user to manipulate different fur patterns during the creation process...if an artist requests the use of a special pattern, we can configure a desired texture pattern before the creation of a Shell texture. The given input texture is applied to generate the seed value for a random vector for texture generation. If a fur strand has several irregularities of colors, a color height map is used for natural fur representation.” [The authors‟ also] “perform physical simulations with the interpolation of relevant data for fur animation, [considering gravity, wind, and touch]. [The method uses] “rotation angles to simulate [external and internal force simulation, by creating] “a force field, which stores a force per vertex in a base mesh...[and simulating] a rotation angle and a rotation axis using the inner and cross products between a force vector and a growing vector...[which enables[ real-time simulation of various...forces.” [The authors‟ method] “reduces about 25% of the extra costs of the redundancy of memory space using the shared