The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt NVIDIA HairWorks Demonstration

Human hair and creature fur will be even more realistic in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt thanks to NVIDIA’s HairWorks solution, and WCCF Tech has shared some details about the demonstration that CD Projekt RED lead engine programmer Balázs Török gave at this past weekend’s GDC to showcase the boundaries they’re pushing with the new technology. A couple of paragraphs:

In the real world, hair might not be given than much importance. But in the Witcher world, which is dependent primarily upon interaction of characters, importance on their realistic representation is the greatest. It is in this realistic representation Török and his team of 50 programmers encountered difficulties. (In movies like ‘˜ Frozen ‘˜ it comes together by quickly piecing together a few million units ,) says Balázs Török . (In game simulation and rendering, such a set of realistic simulated hair will swish the display speed and fun in the basement.)

To solve this problem, and to achieve the most realistic rendering possible, Török and his team tried the Hair Works tool by Nvidia, which has previously also been used in Call of Duty: Ghosts for Dynamic Fur simulation of animal characters. Hair Works works by reducing the memory required in the GPU for hair creation by optimizing rendering algorithms and DX 11 tessellation. Even though the initial results looked promising, the designers were not satisfied, according to Török. The hair appeared too dense and clamped. The solution was in random number generated parameters, which not only allowed density differentiation but also allowed for wind effects. )A physically correct simulation of these chaotic currents would devour too many resources ,) says Török . The conclusion? (The rendering of fur and hair is difficult , but possible.)