The Animated Hair is Blowing in the Wind

Though the song says that "the answer my friend is blowing in the wind," UC San Diego computer scientists and graphics researchers are part of a group that has found the answer for getting hair on animated characters to blow in the wind.

They presented their findings last week at SIGGRAPH 2008, the most prestigous academic computer graphics conference. The work is a collaboration between researchers at UC San Diego, Adobe Inc, and MIT.

Discover Magazine ran a nice story about this work.

Here is the caption for the image at the top of this post:
The left two images demonstrate different aspects of a real hairstyle that the computer scientists captured. The third image from left is the reference photograph of the real hairstyle. The new algorithms created the image on the right, which has photorealistic highlights and texture, even through there are no photographs that were taken at that angle.