At the “NVIDIA Game Festival (NGF)” held in Shanghai, China, we presented several games utilizing NVIDIA GameWorks technology, including the upcoming Kung Fu game ”King of Wushu”. The game is build on CryEngine and makes use of NVIDIA HairWorks and PhysX Clothing for a more realistic look and feel. 

 

NVIDIA HairWorks in “King of Wushu”

One of the highlights of the video is the first warrior’s fur shawl. Traditionally, artists would place a lot of sprites with hand-painted shadows to simulate the fur effect (left image). With NVIDIA HairWorks (right image), an artist can simply “grow” the fur on a surface and use “self-shadowing” to achieve a better-looking interactive fur shawl. In addition, the fur is not just simulated as individual ‘hairs’ but can also be clamped together as in real life providing a realistic fur appearance.

Original fur
Fur with NVIDIA HairWorks

 

The warrior’s long black straight hair is styled in a fashion typical of China’s Kung Fu games.  With the help of NVIDIA HairWorks, the hair interacts with wind and brings the character to live pushing the visual fidelity to another level.

One of the challenging parts of rendering black straight hair is handing specular reflections. Unlike in shampoo commercials, in real world human hair’s specular parts can never form a regular shape. HairWorks provides a simple yet powerful tool to achieve the realistic hair reflections with irregular specular areas.

 

Multi-layered PhysX Clothing

PhysX clothing has already been adopted by many titles. Chinese game developers are interested in advanced PhysX Clothing features, like multi-layered clothing. This is because multi-layered character clothing is part of Chinese Kung Fu culture.

In the “King of Wushu” demo, the second warrior wears multi-layered clothing. There is no cloth intersecting between layers while he is moving! The dynamic clothing along with his flowing hair greatly enhances the fidelity of the character’s appearance.

 

Conclusion

In general, China’s Kung Fu games feature a unique artistic garment style complete with flowing hair and clothing. Traditional methods require artists to hand tweak animations in order to simulate the movement. NVIDIA HairWorks and PhysX Clothing greatly reduce the artist work and make the characters more realistic, providing an immersive game experience.