NVIDIA HairWorks makes it easy to bring hair and fur to life—in real-time! It builds on the prior release, which focused on fur authoring, rendering, and simulation. With HairWorks version 1.1, NVIDIA has added support for authoring, rendering, and simulation of long-hair assets. HairWorks can be used for high-quality assets similar to the example below from Tarkan Sarim, with 500k hair.
It can easily scale down to lower quality assets for use in a variety of games. Since HairWorks is using DX11 for rendering/simulation, it can run on any DX11 capable GPU.

The release contains a variety of sample assets that let artists create completely different types of hairstyles. Below are some of those examples.

The improved authoring pipeline allows artists to quickly iterate on their assets. The grooming pipeline works in combination with third-party tools that are available for both Maya and 3dsMax. The groom is exported via guide curves and growth mesh to the HairWorks Viewer. This allows artists to iterate many aspects of hair and fur in real-time, including lighting, clumping, waviness, and many more.

Because HairWorks makes use of tessellation,  the memory footprint for a simulated hair asset is fairly small. This means that several assets can be easily simulated on the same screen.

 

Based on the settings, hair and fur can be less or more dense, which can significantly alter the appearance of the asset.

 

HairWorks also supports continuous Level of Detail. For assets that are further away, the simulation and rendering time will be made more efficient by reducing the density and increasing the hair width dynamically.

HairWorks has been used to provide a superior visual experience in many games, such as:

The Witcher 3 Monster Hunter Online BM FarCry 4 Call of Duty: Ghosts

As you can see, HairWorks is a great solution for authoring, simulating,  and rendering hair and fur.

It’s available for download from gameworks.nvidia.com. We also provide a UE4 HairWorks integration.