Animating Hair with Loosely Connected Particles

Yosuke Bando Bing-Yu Chen Tomoyuki Nishita
The University of Tokyo

This paper presents a practical approach to the animation of hair at an interactive frame rate. In our approach, we model the hair as a set of particles that serve as sampling points for the volume of the hair, which covers the whole region where hair is present. The dynamics of the hair, including hair-hair interactions, is simulated using the interacting particles. The novelty of this approach is that, as opposed to the traditional way of modeling hair, we release the particles from tight structures that are usually used to represent hair strands or clusters. Therefore, by making the connections between the particles loose while maintaining their overall stiffness, the hair can be dynamically split and merged during lateral motion without losing its lengthwise coherence.

Paper (3.3MB, PDF):
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics 2003), Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 411-418, 2003.
Best Paper Award 3rd Prize: Eurographics Digital Library
Video1 (0.9MB, MPEG-1):
Animation of hair when the head is shaken. The hair dynamically forms clusters.
Video2 (1.6MB, MPEG-1):
Animation of hair blowing in the wind. The wind is also represented by particles, and interacts with the hair.
Comparison of animations with and without hair-hair interactions (1.4MB each, MPEG-1):
The back hair is forced to spread, and then merges again because of gravity.
Hair-hair interactions prevent hair clusters from penetrating each other.

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