my friends forwarded me an interesting article. in it, Palmer Luckey from the rift project was making some dubious claims about rendering hair. when i found out he’s the founder of the occulus rift, and that he was advocating obscene pixel resolution for realistic imaging, i felt i had to reach out and see what was going on.

after a day of back-and-forths it turns out that the article was quoting him correctly – he sees a problem with rendering hair to pixels which are larger than hairs. when i asked him if he can see jaggies in the hair of pixar movies, he said no, but that’s because they don’t do split ends. to which i said “say what?” and the conversation degenerated.

to resolve matters, i suggest we crystalize the issue to a bet. my claim is that it is perfectly possible to render a single human hair to normal resolutions without any visible distortion (aliasing/jaggies.) winner to be determined by independent graphics professionals. what say you, Mr. Luckey?

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Filed under: vfx - @ 12 September 2013 10:44 am