Merging procedural and non-procedural hair grooming

Abstract

Procedural workflows are widely used for creating hair and fur on characters in the visual effects industry, usually in the form of a node-based system. While they are able to create hairstyles with great variety, procedural systems often need to be combined with other external, non-procedural tools to achieve sophisticated, art-directed shapes. We present a new hair-generating workflow, which merges the procedural and non-procedural components for grooming and animating hairs. This new workflow is now a vital component of our character effects pipeline, expediting the process of handling fast-paced projects.