EA has made a creepy video to showcase its next-gen hair technology for games. Sure, it’s impressive, but I’m pretty certain they didn’t have to put the hair on a creepy-ass mannequin.
[jwplayer cRXUZOer]
Anyway, the hair video was posted to a blog by Frostbite, which is the name of the engine EA uses to create a lot of its games, like Battlefield 1, for example. Hair is notoriously difficult to get right in a gaming setting because developers are limited to the processing power of current consoles and PCs. This is why it’s often rendered more like chunks rather than individual hairs.
“Our purpose is to produce a step change in real-time hair and reach results close to movie and offline rendering,” the blog post says. “Starting last year, a small group of frostbite physics and rendering engineers have been working on pushing this technology forward, and, while we still have quite a lot of work ahead of us, we’re proud of what we achieved.”
You can see the demo for yourself below.
To be fair, it is a pretty big step forward in terms of realism, and something we’ll likely see more of when next-gen hardware gets closer to consumers. You can actually make out individual strands of hair, which is insane in the context of gaming.
They could have done without the weird mannequins, but what would I know about hair demos? I, for one, look forward to the first wave of realistic haircut simulator games when this rendering technology goes mainstream.
Hair.
