NEWS
by Mark Barley
AMD unveils the TressFX hair tech
AMD revealed their TressFX hair rendering tech using Tomb Raider's Lara Croft as an example.
The test was unveiled over at the AMD blog where it was posted;
“Realistic hair is one of the most complex and challenging materials to accurately reproduce in real-time.
“Convincingly recreating a head of lively hair involves drawing tens of thousands of tiny and individual semi-transparent strands, each of which casts complex shadows and requires anti-aliasing. Even more challengingly, these calculations must be updated dozens of times per second to synchronize with the motion of a character.”
Some examples shown on the blog featured Croft's hair looking pretty spectacular and detailed. “Convincingly recreating a head of lively hair involves drawing tens of thousands of tiny and individual semi-transparent strands, each of which casts complex shadows and requires anti-aliasing. Even more challengingly, these calculations must be updated dozens of times per second to synchronize with the motion of a character.”
“TressFX Hair revolutionizes Lara Croft’s locks by using the DirectCompute programming language to unlock the massively-parallel processing capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture, enabling image quality previously restricted to pre-rendered images.
“Building on AMD’s previous work on Order Independent Transparency (OIT), this method makes use of Per-Pixel Linked-List (PPLL) data structures to manage rendering complexity and memory usage.”
AMD also stated that the tech responds to gravity as well, meaning if you're hanging upside down you're in-game hair is going to be upside down with you. “Building on AMD’s previous work on Order Independent Transparency (OIT), this method makes use of Per-Pixel Linked-List (PPLL) data structures to manage rendering complexity and memory usage.”
Are you excited about this bit of tech?