Dynamic fur on mobile using textured offset surfaces

Abstract

Fur simulation is crucial in many graphic applications since it can greatly enhance the realistic visual effect of virtual objects, e.g. animal avatars. However, due to its high computational cost of massive fur strands processing and motion complexity, dynamic fur is regarded as a challenging task, especially on the mobile platforms with low computing power. In order to support real-time fur rendering in mobile applications, we propose a novel method called textured offset surfaces (TOS). In particular, the furry surface is represented by a set of offset surfaces, as shown in Figure 1(a). The offset surfaces are shifted outwards from the original mesh. Each offset surface is textured with scattering density (red rectangles in Figure 1(a)) to implicitly represent the fur geometry, whose value can be changed by texture warping to simulate the fur animation. In order to achieve high quality anisotropic illumination result, as shown in Figure 1(b), Kajiya/Banks lighting model is employed in the rendering phase.