14 DAY TRIAL // Developers are providing increasingly realistic character in their games, from fully motion-captured animations and facial expressions to incredible dynamic lighting effects that offer a richer visual experience.
One of the areas that have been pretty difficult to simulate is the natural aspect and movement of hair, which is part of the reason hair rendering is usually so bland in most games and so many characters seem to look somewhat the same.
This has not yet been resolved, even after the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 came out, but according to Naughty Dog animator Jonathan Cooper, we'll see some considerable improvements in the near future.
"A major reason so many last-gen characters sported crew cuts was we couldn't do hair easily. I expect much more hairstyles this generation," he tweets.
"Primarily because engines couldn't support realistic lighting on alpha (see-through) textures, not to mention physics on long hair," he adds.
This could be one of the reasons players usually got to assume control of characters favoring baseball caps (Watch Dogs), short hair (Sniper Elite) or hoods (Assassin's Creed), but it seems that the era of Van Halen and Kiss-style hairdos in games is getting nearer and nearer.
He has explained that there are also some new pieces of technology available now that will help the team create more realistic characters, reducing "the homogenisation of game characters" and greatly aiding devs in the difficulties they face when it comes to rendering realistic hair and other such textures.
He could have been talking about some new technology that might have already been seen in action in the Uncharted 4: A Thief's End trailer unveiled during this year's edition of the E3 gaming expo, which was said to be created entirely in-engine, and showed a pretty realistic Drake, with some pretty detailed hair.
Hair simulation is indeed tricky, but progress has already been made in the area, most notably through Nvidia Hairworks, a rendering technology that is meant to provide an answer to AMD's TressFX, a middleware solution that strives to accurately model and render various types of hair and fur.
The middleware was seen in action in Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Ghosts, where Riley, the playable German Shepherd dog, benefited from some richly flowing fur thanks to Nvidia's product.
Another notable developer making use of Hairworks is Polish video game maker CD Projekt RED, the studio using the technology to render various in-game beasts such as wolves.