The Fur Project

The “Fur Project” included researching and implementing methods to model and render photorealistic fur or hair. The goal was to create software that renders millions of hair segments in a minimum of time. This was a one-man project and took me about three months as part of a Computer Graphics course I took at Simon Fraser University in 1999.

Features

Photorealistic rendering (with anti-aliasing and self-shadowing)
Quick quality rendering, quick previewing
Animation of fur
Fur can be applied to selected objects in the scene
Adjustable length, thickness, and density
Adjustable stiffness and perturbation
Local color / length / direction control via texture maps
Special shading model developed for hair
Imports 3d Studio rel3 (.3ds) files
Written in C++, uses OpenGL and Windows API for graphics output
Saves to Targa (.tga) files
High portability (core engine is platform independent)

Pictures

This ball and torus were used to test and benchmark the shading model. Regularly shaped objects are typically used to examine the shadow gradient and highlights.

Throughout the project, I used this squirrel (that i modeled after a picture I took on Vancouver Island) to demonstrate the software

In this example, by turning the color green, grass can be simulated, in this case very long grass