hair

[famas_man]

i was wondering if anyone here knew if realistic looking hair would be possible in hl2. By realistic i mean strands instead of a clump that is textured

 

[chu]

maybe. if so maybe you can animate strands and apply physics to them so they will bounce around when enemy is jostled.

 

[Majestic XII]

Ive been talking to gabe about this. You will be able to apply the physics to the hair making it move realistic to the wind/movement.

I will use this in my mod.

Everything is possble with some coding

 

[Fuzzy]

Surely that would be a massice CPU drain whenever a player with that hair is in picture?

 

[dawdler]

Originally posted by Fuzzy
Surely that would be a massice CPU drain whenever a player with that hair is in picture?

I dont really think anyone is hoping it to be as complex as 3Dmarks hairstyle

Making first the entire hair move a little (as seen in Neverwinternights) and then parts of it (hair hanging down in chunks) move shouldnt be that much of a strain. Especially if you make it so that the engine dont care about it if the model in question is to far away. (even at a lousy 40m distance you wont see much of the hair on anyone)

 

[The Dark Elf]

Just use a few layered polys with hair maps and transparency maps (or alpha channels since they said Targa's are being used). I'm sure if their separate objects to the rest of the model they'll be able to have their own weight and react differently to movement. Though I've no idea if the Source engine can handle self collisions (such as long hair touching the lower back) so may likely have to be careful how its done. But simple layered polys with the above type maps work just as well as genuine hair dynamics, which themselves wont be seen fully in games for some time, its still relativley new (few years) in the pre-rendered industry. And even though the likes of XSI with Joe Alter's shave and a haircut system can do realtime guide hairs with dynamics and collisions, switch on a few hundred thousand render hairs and watch that framerate drop to 0

For now faking it with mapped polys is just fine, and looks far better than it sounds, and if faking it sometimes is good enough for the movies, its more than good enough for games

 

[famas_man]

thankyou for the detailed replies.

 

[The Dark Elf]

your welcome

 

[Punisher454]

The CPU drain problem could minimized somewhat by good use of a LOD system. Make the LOD that starts cranking up the polys be close enough so that you'd probably be hard pressed to create a situation where you that close to more than one character at a time.

I dont think were going to have enough power for the idea of modeling individual strands with physics in real time for a few more years. But it will be practical someday thats for sure.

I plan to go the "FAKE IT" route myself, with patches and layers, but not strands. And I'll be making full use of the LOD system.

 

[babywax]

Why don't you make a special bone set for models that has rag doll applied, like in the E3 demo with the combine soldier being thrown around.
Rag doll would have to support self-collisions, otherwise body parts would be inside body parts

 

[The Dark Elf]

Originally posted by babywax
Why don't you make a special bone set for models that has rag doll applied, like in the E3 demo with the combine soldier being thrown around.
Rag doll would have to support self-collisions, otherwise body parts would be inside body parts

that would work I reckon. I imagine Valve will have planned ahead and made it simple to setup any sort of bone structure needed. The only problem I could see is if the ragdoll system uses bounding boxes across separate sections. Works ok for bodies and such but single poly hair with no thickness and many joints would be a b*tch to setup... unless. someone writes up a little script for XSI to split hair sections apart

so yeah I reckon your idea would work

I'm kinda hoping though that it wont require bones in the ragdoll effects and works with polys or points only.. If that was the case then you could have "almost" real looking fabric, laying cloth over tables that'll fall correctly or even carpets or rugs that could be used to litterally pull the ground from under a bad guys feet! I'm hopefull of that after seeing the matresses on the vids. It looks like it could be done. curtains blowing in the wind, spooky atmosphere mmmm excellent