Pixar's New Presentation on Modeling Procedural Hair

The studio revealed some procedural methods that were used to create hair for Lightyear's Alisha and Izzy Hawthorne.

If you are interested in using procedural techniques for character art, here's an informative presentation that you might find very useful. Pixar Animation Studios' Sofya Ogunseitan recently released a great paper on the processes and methods added to Pixar’s groom pipeline to create the hairstyles of Lightyear characters Alisha and Izzy Hawthorne. The processes include novel ways of generating braids, curls, braid partitioning hairs (edge hairs), and graphic shapes populated with hair.

The presentation gives an in-depth look at tools that were used to create Alisha and Izzy's hairstyles. According to Sofya, these tools rely on hand-sculpted source curves, along which braids and curls are then generated and deformed, allowing Groom Artists not to spend time sculpting complex patterns by hand thanks to proceduralism.

Thanks to snippets of code and formulas in the paper, it is also possible to learn how this AAA animation studio creates procedural braids, sets up partitions between braids using the same source curves that were described above, how cross-section combinations were achieved, making sure that no two curls share identical morphology even if they follow a similar pattern, and how Izzy’s complex afro-puffs were generated.

You can read the full presentation here.

Pixar's New Presentation on Modeling Procedural Hair

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