Robin Taillandier & Jon Valdes - Every Strand Counts: Physics and Rendering Behind Frostbite’s Hair

Robin Taillandier and Jon Valdes explain the physics simulation and rendering pipeline behind strand-based hair in EA's Frostbite engine.

Strand-based hair can produce amazing results, but using it in real time for games has been a technical challenge for years. This session covers the advances realized by the Frostbite team on the subject and explains improvements in rendering and simulation. From a rendering standpoint, we will present a new rendering pipeline specifically designed for strand hair rendering, and the substantial improvements in visual quality this new system gives to a shipping game. From a simulation standpoint, we will give some details on our Eulerian/Lagrangian model and its various applications, our different constraints and our style preservation technique. We will also explain why we believe Strand-Based Hair is an improvement for authoring hair content in addition to quality of rendering and simulation. Speaker's bio: Jon Valdés has been working as a rendering engineer at Frostbite for the last 4 years, where he's helped build the technology behind games like FIFA, Anthem or Star Wars Battlefront II. He's been part of the Image Quality group, where he has focused mainly on global illumination, post effects, and realistic hair rendering. Robin first job in the video game industry was in Ubisoft Montpellier, in the physics simulation department. After working for two years on gesture in an another studio in Belgium he joined EA in Stockholm in 2012 and has been working with the Frostbite Physics team since. Robin has worked on cloth simulation (also used for hair cards) for more than 6 years, and has led the initiative for strand base hair in Frostbite for 2 years.