Color me natural.(Technology: rendering)(Brief Article)

Rendering natural-looking hair is key to creating realistic virtual humans. But the process is turning out to be a lot more complicated than it looks. Not only must the geometry of thousands of strands be determined, but the scattering of light from each one also must be accurately simulated. So far, most work has focused on modeling the geometry of hair. But when simulating light reflections, traditional shading models have treated the fibers simplistically, as smooth, opaque cylinders that neither transmit light nor produce any internal reflections. Now, a team of researchers from Cornell and Stanford headed by Cornell's Steve Marschner has devised a new model that more accurately simulates the way light reflects from actual hair fibers. For example, because the whole fiber is made of a pigmented semi-transparent material, it not only ...