Hair preview!

Today I finally got time to put a vid on my website showing what I'm doing with my life right now: hair. It's a really short sequence demonstrating a handful of guide hairs being subject some high-intensity motion. I guess I'll post it here as well, but make sure to keep an eye on the website for future sneak peeks! Notice the inertia, stiffness and tolerance to large derivatives. Those wondering about the sparsity of hair strands should know that the Renderman/MentalRay shaders will interpolate these "guide hairs" and create 1000s of hairs between them once the scene passes through the rendering pipeline. By increasing the density of guide hairs in areas that somehow will interact with the environment (e.g. having fingers drawn through them) one can better capture the detail in those areas, while saving processing time by populating less dynamic areas much more sparsely. Typically a full head of lead character hair has between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand guide hairs.