Super-Helices for Predicting the Dynamics of Natural Hair
Florence Bertails, Basile Audoly, Marie-Paule Cani, Bernard Querleux, Frédéric Leroy, Jean-Luc Lévêque
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH conference) - August 2006

Abstract
Simulating human hair is recognized as one of the most difficult tasks in computer animation. In this paper, we show that the Kirchhoff equations for dynamic, inextensible elastic rods can be used for accurately predicting hair motion. These equations fully account for the nonlinear behavior of hair strands with respect to bending and twisting. We introduce a novel deformable model for solving them: each strand is represented by a Super-Helix, i.e., a piecewise helical rod which is animated using the principles of Lagrangian mechanics. This results in a realistic and stable simulation, allowing large time steps. Our second contribution is an in-depth validation of the Super-Helix model, carried out through a series of experiments based on the comparison of real and simulated hair motions. We show that our model efficiently handles a wide range of hair types with a high level of realism.

Read the full paper in pdf.
Slides for my presentation
of the Super-Helix model.
Movie : Quicktime format (mac),
flash format (multi-platform),
MPEG-1 format (windows/linux)

See also Florence's webpage on the paper.

Bibliographic references :

Basile Audoly

Laboratoire de modélisation en mécanique
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
4, place Jussieu — 75005 Paris