#4
3rd Sep 2013 at 8:27 AM
Last edited by HystericalParoxysm : 3rd Sep 2013 at
9:37 AM.
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It's not even just "an entire time" dedicated to rendering the hair, but a LONG TIME. When they're doing intense animation like that (not just hair, but really, any big 3D animation) they set up render farms - computers specifically decked out with the shiniest hardware for rendering fast, and there's not just one but MANY of them connected together. And it still takes quite a while to render a single frame - that is, one image of the 24+ frames that you may see in a single second. While there are lower-poly, simpler ways of rendering hair quickly, anything even remotely like Rapunzel's hair in Tangled is just completely impossible in a computer game right now.
ETA: Long and flowing is possible, in some form, but it's usually pretty messy. Go look at how the hair was done in Heavenly Sword - yeah, it's long, but the physics are pretty wrong,it clips, and it looks kinda weird. Just not gonna get smooth lovely prettyness from a hair of any length like that, and even doing something as "simple" as floor-length hair would be tricky with the methods EA's used to build the hairs for TS2 and TS3 (and will likely use for TS4), with polygons and bone assignments rather than something that can look more organic and flowing, but is a lot bigger strain to render.
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