Measuring Realism in Hair Rendering

Abstract

Visualisation of hair is an extremely complex problem within the field of Computer Graphics. Over the last 10 years, huge strides have been made in the area of physically-based hair rendering, giving rise to many applications in various fields other than the graphics industry. Given the number of models for hair rendering, there is no well defined evaluation process to measure the realism in the hair models in use today. For this work-in-progress paper, we propose an evaluation process not only to evaluate the realism in hair rendering models, but also examine the various effects that contribute to its realistic perception. This builds an index of realism based on experiments with computer generated models, and then proposes comparing the results with values obtained from computational tomography, optical imaging and goniophotometer readings.