3D Printed hair modeling from strand-level hairstyles

Abstract

Recent advances in the design and fabrication of personalized figurines have made the creation of high-quality figurines possible for ordinary users with the facilities of 3D printing techniques. The hair plays an important role in gaining the realism of the figurines. Existing hair reconstruction methods suffer from the high demand for acquisition equipment, or the result is approximated very coarsely. Instead of creating hairs for figurines by scanning devices, we present a novel surface reconstruction method to generate a 3D printable hair model with geometric features from a strand-level hairstyle, thus converting the exiting digital hair database to a 3D printable database. Given a strand-level hair model, we filter the strands via bundle clustering, retain the main features, and reconstruct hair strands in two stages. First, our algorithm is the key to extracting the hair contour surface according to the structure of strands and calculating the normal for each vertex. Next, a close, manifold triangle mesh with geometric details and an embedded direction field is achieved with the Poisson surface reconstruction. We obtain closed-manifold hairstyles without user interactions, benefiting personalized figurine fabrication. We verify the feasibility of our method by exhibiting a wide range of examples.