Animating Hair with Loosely Connected Particles

This paper presents a practical approach to the animation of hair at an interactive frame rate. In our approach, we model the hair as a set of particles that serve as sampling points for the volume of the hair, which covers the whole region where hair is present. The dynamics of the hair, including hair-hair interactions, is simulated using the interacting particles. The novelty of this approach is that, as opposed to the traditional way of modeling hair, we release the particles from tight structures that are usually used to represent hair strands or clusters. Therefore, by making the connections between the particles loose while maintaining their overall stiffness, the hair can be dynamically split and merged during lateral motion without losing its lengthwise coherence.