Again within the 2010s, fur and hair in video games was created by including polygon strips and clear textures to a personality, and although this was a easy and performant approach, the outcome appeared utterly static and visually uninteresting. With extra layers and a few fundamental animation, high quality and realism might be improved tremendously, however dynamic motion and correct shading remained unimaginable.
The answer: NVIDIA HairWorks, which added as much as 115,000 DirectX 11, tessellated hair strands to characters, every reacting realistically to motion and exterior forces. This use of particular person hairs and layers enabled dynamic lighting to permeate all through every strand and layer, for hairs to be precisely shadowed, and for deeper layers to be self-shadowed by different hairs, bettering picture high quality additional nonetheless.
For The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we labored carefully with CD PROJEKT RED all through the sport’s improvement, including HairWorks to Geralt’s hair types and beards, to the mane of Roach, to the manes of different horses, and to over three dozen monsters. Out within the open world, this important enterprise resulted within the addition of HairWorks to the vast majority of Geralt’s animal and supernatural assailants, creating immersive scenes and encounters all through the 100-hour motion RPG.
HairWorks pioneered life like hair rendering, and now, a decade later, multi-platform video games are delivery with performant real-time hair results as commonplace.
With the addition of path tracing to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, our crew has added Linear-Swept Spheres (LSS) path-traced hair rendering for Geralt and all HairWorks-enhanced NPCs and enemies on GeForce RTX 50 Sequence GPUs, which launched assist for LSS primitives by way of their fourth era Ray Tracing Cores.