Introduction to Hair Modeling

Modeling human characteristics is one of the most difficulte and challenging issues in todays computer graphics. One of the most difficult characteristic is the modeling of realistic hair. In the late 1980s noew techniques appeared in an effort to create realistic hair models. These models were only for creating furry object, such as teddy bears, and spiders. By using variations of these techniques it is possible to create realistic hair models.

Hairstyling Process
In the hair styling of real hair a hair stylist uses many artificial techniques, such as shearing, perming and combing, to get the desired hairstyle. Other improtant factors in slelecting a desirable hairstyle include the techniques used in the creation of, and the natural and physical properties of the hair (color, width, pliability and volumetric appearance). When we are creating a method to model hairstyling we need to take into account both artificial and intrinsic properties must be considered.

Dynamical Behavior
A model based on the physical properties of hair may not be the most useful model available. This is primarily due to the number of unkonw functions in the derived differential equations need to recreate all the physical properties. Another problem with a physically based model is the problem of dealing with the self-interaction between individual hairs, such as collision detection. The number of calculations that are needed for these types of interations between thousands of individual hairs are such that it would be infeasible to use a physically based model system

To symplify the process we can disregard inter-hair collisions. By doing so we able to greatly lower the number of computations needed in order to recreate the behavior of hair. We are also able to derive simple differential equations that avoid dealing with physically rigorous formulation, but deal with the visual representations of the hair.