Hair is one of the toughest body parts to render in any digital medium like animated movies and video games. Hair isn’t a simple texture, but rather an amalgamation of thousands upon thousands of fine strands grouped very closely – and emulating this in a realistic fashion at real-time frame rates can consume exorbitant amounts of computing resources. What’s even more tricky is simulating the movement of these strands, which requires complex physics implementation of its own. Many games fail to hit the mark when it comes to hair physics, but some games do a wonderful job in this regard and this feature will run down 15 such examples
Horizon Forbidden West
Guerrilla Games delivered an excellent sequel with Horizon Forbidden West, a game that corrected almost every criticism with the original all while greatly expanding upon the scope of the original release. Horizon Forbidden West is also a visual powerhouse that presents its gargantuan world with striking attention to detail, and one of the more impressive aspects of that presentation is definitely Aloy’s hair. Sporting dense braided locks, Aloy’s character model has full hair physics for each of these locks that swirl and twirl with each movement. Sure, they are prone to glitching out every now and then which results in some hilarious moments – but by and large, the hair looks and functions in a pretty realistic fashion.
