A stylized cartoon hair renderer

Abstract

This paper describes a new hair rendering technique for Anime characters. The overall goal is to improve current cel shaders by introducing a new hair model and hair shader. The hair renderer is based on a painterly rendering algorithm which uses a large amount of particles. The hair model is rendered twice: first for generating the silhouettes and second for shading the hair strands. In addition we also describe a modified technique for specular highlighting. Most of the rendering steps (except the specular highlighting) are performed on the GPU and take advantage of recent graphics hardware. However, since the number of particles determines the quality of the hair shader, a large number of particles is used which reduces the performance accordingly.