Hairworks and Graphic Cards

The spline based dynamic hair grooming system was tested in the past week. It has been a eyesore after I noticed that when Alet is posed upside down her hair is largely still kept in shape like it was applied too much hair gel.

Building real-time, fully physics driven hair not only makes every thread of hair interactable with other objects independently, it is also a necessary step towards creating CG grade characters with long, straight hair without making the strands resemble hair cards dangling from the scalp. This technical concern has become an immediate challenge since we start sketching the concept for Rena. The reason why we did not allow hair customization in the game is also due to the unstable nature of current interim solution for hair rendering - we need to make sure whether it is a practical choice to switch to the new system before putting the artists to work.

So now we have good news and bad news. Good news is that it works as intended despite some minor issues such as the hair accessories moving asynchronously; bad news is that this solution is SUPER heavy as to decimate the frame rate to 1/3 on main stream middle end graphic cards. Since this is a bleeding edge feature for game building in Unreal, I'm pretty sure graphic card producers will release driver updates to mitigate the performance impact later on.

We will closely monitor the updates related to the new hair solution, and once we deem it is a good timing for the system to shine we are going to add it to the game.