Computer animators have invented a new way to make virtual blondes look more like the real thing in movies and computer games. But as this ScienCentral News video explains, it might even help improve your hair color.
Keeping It Real
Whether someone's blonde hair is real isn't always easy to tell. But Cornell researchers say faking it in the digital world is a big challenge. Steve Marschner has assisted in the computer-generated effects of movies like "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong." He says moviegoers can sense when the simulations aren't keeping it real.
"If you're rendering say, you know, blue-haired monsters there's a pretty wide latitude in what the result looks like and people will accept that it looks like a furry blue monster because they've never really seen one before," says Marschner. "People are just so sensitive because we spend all our lives looking at other people and at their faces. So humans are an extra difficult problem because people know exactly what the answer should be and so you have to get it exactly right."
Current methods for creating realistic digital do's work fine for brunettes, but blondes have always been high-maintenance. That's because rays of light not only bounce off blonde hairs, but also through them -- resulting in a complicated tangle of calculations that required several days of processing for each frame.
The previous approach, called "path-tracing," required the computer to work backward from each pixel of the image, literally tracing each ray of light back to its source.
Marschner's team developed new software that first creates a map of where rays of light travel throughout the hair. This process involves some approximations of the light scattering, but in test-renderings the results are nearly identical to the path-tracing approach. And instead of days, it takes just two or three hours to render each frame.
"We can compare the images and see that they're very similar to each other, and that helps us to understand that we have the right answer, except that we've managed to achieve it fifty to one-hundred times faster than the method that was previously available," he says.
image: Steve Marschner
Besides more realistic virtual humans, Marschner thinks this work might even lead to better blondes in the real world by allowing hair care companies to virtually test multiple products.
"You can skip an awful lot of work and you can sort of virtually try out lots of different things and then focus in only on the ones that really work. And so we may well see some improvements in say shampoo formulations that come out of this," says Marschner.
He also hopes to develop better ways to simulate how blonde hair moves, making fake blondes of tomorrow no joke.
Marschner's blonde locks are still a work in progress, but may show up at your local theater within the next year or two.
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