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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 2nd Sep 2013 at 11:41 PM
Default Who wanted Disney 'Tangled' hair?
Is that too big an ask do you think? I know nothing about animating! Over all I prefer the look of the Sims to those in S3 and maybe even S2 as well, we'll have to see. I feel really disappointed with the hair though! I thought in this day and age they'd have come up with something a little more 'wow'.

I want 'Tangled' hair! *Stomps feet*
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#2 Old 2nd Sep 2013 at 11:55 PM
Pixar hair came up in another thread (ETA: hereabouts). Animation hair with that level of detail is very resource-intensive; someone mentioned that there's an entire time dedicated to rendering the hair. It is not feasible for a consumer game.
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#3 Old 3rd Sep 2013 at 6:43 AM
If you want to know about how hair and animation work together, and why it truly is something that makes animators want to curl up in the fetal position under their desks, listen to the commentary track for "The Incredibles" (another great Pixar movie). The hair in that film runs the gamut of animations: wind blowing through it, wet hair, short hair, long hair, etc. In the commentary, they have a very large discussion as to WHY hair is very hard to animate on that level, and how there was more attention to details needed than even the super powers the characters in the film have. Now, I am not saying it would, strictly speaking, be impossible, however, Tempscire is correct in saying how it is very resource intensive. Also, consider current CC hair. Yes, there are some hairs that have high amounts of detail to them, but along with that comes an extremely high poly-count. They just don't look as good on lower-end computers, and even some middle-range ones.
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#4 Old 3rd Sep 2013 at 8:27 AM Last edited by HystericalParoxysm : 3rd Sep 2013 at 9:37 AM.
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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Field Researcher
#5 Old 3rd Sep 2013 at 7:02 PM
The latest Tomb Raider had pretty good hear with the Tressfx something, but that slowed my game down considerably, so I doubt something like that will be possible for a hood full with sims. No parties then! :P
Theorist
#6 Old 3rd Sep 2013 at 7:09 PM
Yep, TressFX is what this thread made me think of. It's amazing in the Youtube vids, but it brought my GTX460 to its knees. I'm talking <5fps, and that was just Lara's hair. Imagine how bad it would be with a screen full of sims. Many gamers don't even have a video card as good as a GTX460, so something like this is definitely not happening.

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#7 Old 3rd Sep 2013 at 7:20 PM
I didn't have any problems with the hair in Tomb Raider and I had it cranked all the way up the whole time... but I also didn't find it terribly impressive. I recall going, "That's what all the fuss is about? Doesn't look that fantastic, and look, it's clipping there, there, and there..." Meh.

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Instructor
#8 Old 3rd Sep 2013 at 7:32 PM
As far as I understood, animating hair, especially complicated hair like in Tangled or Brave, can be difficult. If I recall correctly, the team that made Brave animated each hair strand (I can't remember of the exact number, but there were a LOT of hair strands) and they even have to create a special software to animate all the curly hair.
Mad Poster
#9 Old 4th Sep 2013 at 1:30 PM
i don't think rapunzels hair is that great.
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