About Hair Farm

More than a software!

Hair Farm is not just a new software,it is a collection of state-of-the-art technologies for hair production in Computer Graphics.
 

When Cem Yuksel first started the Hair Farm project, the available technologies in Computer Graphics for modeling, animating, and rendering hair were very limited and under-developed for producing a hair software that would fully satisfy an artist. Therefore, while he was writing Hair Farm, he also got engaged in a number of research activities and proposed various novel technologies required for a solid hair modeling, animation, and rendering software.

After 6 years of research and development, he managed to solve the last piece of the puzzle with his invention of Hair Meshes. This novel hair modeling approach is presented in SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in the Technical Papers session, among some of the top Computer Graphics research works being published this year.

Novel Technologies

Hair Farm is not just another tool for producing hair on virtual characters. It is a completely new design that combines state-of-the-art technologies with an artist-friendly user interface and a flexible workflow.

Some of the novel technologies in Hair Farm are the following:

◾ A whole new hair modeling pipeline combining the best ideas both the industry and the academia, including hair mesh modeling,
◾ An artist-friendly realistic hair material that can efficiently handle complicated light behavior like multiple scattering in hair volume to produce physically-based realism,
◾ A highly optimized high-quality ray tracer for hair that automatically handles anti-aliasing without the need to specify the number of samples,
◾ A whole new hair simulation technique that can robustly handle complicated models and advanced physical behavior like hair-hair interaction,
◾ Technologies in curve representations for modeling and rendering.

 These novel technologies in their most advanced form only exist in Hair Farm. No other hair production tool, including commercial software and proprietary tools used in major studios, has these technologies. With Hair Farm you can produce images that cannot be replicated by any other software in the world! 

Some of these technologies were published in some of the most prestigious journals and conferences in Computer Graphics. These include:

◾ Hair mesh modeling (SIGGRAPH Asia 2009)
 Cem Yuksel, Scott Schaefer, and John Keyser, "Hair Meshes," Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 (Transactions on Graphics), 28(4) 2009. 
◾ Finding the "best" curve representations (Solid Modeling 2009)
 Cem Yuksel, Scott Schaefer, and John Keyser, "On the Parameterization of Catmull-Rom Curves," SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling 2009. 
◾ Efficient computation of multiple scattering in hair (SIGGRAPH 2008)
 Arno Zinke, Cem Yuksel, Andreas Weber, and John Keyser "Dual Scattering Approximation for Fast Multiple Scattering in Hair," Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2008 (Transactions on Graphics), 27(3) 2008. 
◾ A fast and high-quality method for hair shadows (Eurographics 2008)
 Cem Yuksel and John Keyser, "Deep Opacity Maps," Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EUROGRAPHICS 2008), 2008. 

In addition to these published technologies above, Hair Farm includes many novel proprietary technologies, some of which will be published in the near future.

Check out the full comparison between the Hair and Fur modifier of 3ds Max and Hair Farm.  

Hair Farm's revolutionary hair modeling pipeline gives you precise control over the shape of your hair model. Hair modeling has never been so easy! If you can model anything at all, you will be able to model the exact hair that you want with Hair Farm!

Hair Farm comes with various tools which make modeling all hair from fur to medium and long hair exceptionally simple. Even very long hair, which has been extraordinarily difficult with all previous hair modeling tools, is as simple as modeling any other object! The variety of modeling tools permits choosing your own way of modeling hair depending on your target hairstyle. With Hair Farm you don't need to be satisfied by some hair model that looks somewhat similar to what you imagined; Hair Farm allows you to create exactly what you had in mind and makes it easier than ever before!

Hair Farm also has many hairstyling tools that provide global control over the shapes of individual hair strands. These hairstyling tools can be applied to any hair model in any order and any number of times, so that you can easily achieve the result you want. All hairstyling tools have various parameters allowing you to easily and precisely control their effect. Furthermore, most of these parameters can be controlled by assigning maps, and so you can easily have different parameter values for each hair strand if you like.

Hair Farm comes with an incredibly fast hair renderer. After you use this hair renderer once, you won't have the patience to use any other. Hair Farm Renderer can render millions of hairs within seconds!

Hair Farm Renderer always produces production-quality images with correct anti-aliasing and pixel blending. It does not have a "draft quality" setting simply because it does not need to!

The following figure is a comparison between the rendering speed of Hair Farm and the Hair and Fur modifier of 3ds Max. You can clearly see that Hair Farm is much faster. In this example Hair Farm is more than 35 times faster!
Too good to be true? Download Hair Farm Demo and see for yourself!

Furthermore, with Hair Farm you don't need to worry about finding the right value for number of hair segment while rendering, because Hair Farm Renderer does not render line segments, it directly renders curves! Therefore, regardless of the number of segments you use to define your hair model, you always get nice smooth hair.

Hair Farm also has an exceptionally fast ray-tracing engine. You can use this ray tracer for reflections and refractions as well as to render hairs from the camera.

Hair Farm Renderer works within the main renderer of your choice. You can use any renderer that supports 3ds Max plug-ins with Hair Farm Renderer. We have successfully tested Hair Farm with major 3rd party renderer plugins of 3ds Max like v-ray and Brazil r/s. Hair Farm also has an extensive set of render elements that permits easy compositing and post-processing. Moreover, Hair Farm allows you to automatically convert all hair objects to mental ray hair primitives and render using mental-ray's native hair renderer.

Check out the full comparison between the Hair and Fur modifier of 3ds Max and Hair Farm.

Hair Farm comes with two separate hair materials, one of which is intended for cartoon-like or stylized characters, while the other one is physically-based and designed for realistic looking hair. Both of these materials are exceptionally easy to use.

The realistic hair material of Hair Farm successfully combines the state-of-the-art techniques in physically-based hair rendering with an artist-friendly and easy-to-use interface. It efficiently performs sophisticated physical computations such as multiple scattering of light through the hair volume to produce all the little details you need for realistic-looking hair. Furthermore, it provides a user-friendly interface that makes it appear similar to any other material in 3ds Max.

Both hair materials can be edited in the material editor of 3ds Max. Just like any other material in 3ds Max, almost all parameters can be controlled by assigning maps. You can easily control how these maps are applied to different hair strands as well as along a hair strand from its root to its tip using Hair Farm's UVW mapping capabilities. Transparency is handled exactly as any other transparent object in 3ds Max. No need to hack hair transparency with multiple passes as 3ds Max's Hair and Fur modifier does! Simply change the opacity parameter of a hair material, and hairs become as transparent as you like!