News from Chronicle Online

High-tech hairdo: New Cornell method gets that natural look in computer-generated blond hair

July 19, 2006

By Bill Steele
ws21@cornell.edu

Poets and novelists often describe hair as "shining" or "shimmering." Dark hair has a "sheen"; blond hair "glows." All this comes about because of the complex scattering of incident light off of individual hairs and from one hair to another.

Reproducing this effect in computer graphics has always been a challenge. Computers can create three-dimensional structures resembling hair, but the process of "rendering," in which the computer figures out how light will be reflected from those structures to create an image, requires complex calculations that take into account the scattering between hairs. Current methods use approximations that work well for dark hair and passably for brown, but computer-generated blondes still don't look like they're having more fun.

But now Cornell researchers have developed a new and much quicker method for rendering hair that promises to make blond (and other light-colored) hair more realistic.

Steve Marschner, Cornell assistant professor of computer science, developed the new method with Cornell graduate student Jonathan Moon, who will present the work at the 2006 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Boston July 30 to Aug. 3.

Full article here:

<a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July06/Marschner.hair.ws.html>http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July06/Marschner.hair.ws.html