Around 2011 i got interested in hair generation. The topic is very fascinating. One day at work in a little company the team was asked the question: "Why can't we do hair proper and fast? Is it that hard?". On the way back to home i thought the question over and over. Is it really that hard?

After a while i answered the question for myself with: Yes! it is really that hard. Because people easily tend to see it as one working step in character creation. By the way the same thing happens with cloth.

Not involved in the details, the creation of cg creature gets most times divided into modeling, texturing, rigging, hair, cloth, animation and rendering.

But hair and cloth too should not be written in one line with the working steps. The creation of a creatures hair or fur is not a working step. It is a feature of the creature like the legs, arms or the head.

The conclusion of this is that the creation of hair involves all the working steps. The creation of hair is a complex task, which involves the following working steps: hair-modeling, hair-shading, hair-animation(mostly through simulation) and hair rendering.

The video below shows my first output of a hair primitive generation tool prototype written in python. The primitive data was passed through a geometry shader into the mental ray renderer.