Real-time generation and rendering of body hair

Procedural human body hairs generated on an arm mesh and rendered using our system.

Although many methods have been proposed to generate and render fur and human hair, no method have been proposed to specifically generate human body hairs, usually represented using textures. However the use of a texture is not suited when the camera is close to the hairy region to render. As part of this project we wanted to design a method allowing a user to quickly generate human body hairs on a potentially animated input mesh.

This was my first actual project related to 3D Computer Graphics. As part of this project I implemented a real-time generation and rendering system of human body hair. The system is able to generate human body hair geometries on a mesh, depending on some user-defined parameters such as the level of hairiness, or the approximate length, height, width or direction of hairs. The shape of each body hair is generated using randomized Hermite Curves. The geometry is camera aligned, and tilted vertex normals are used in order to fake circular cross sections. A geometry shader has been used to generate the body hair. Phong shading is used for body hair surface shading. The system has been implemented using C++ and OpenGL 4.