SPARSE AND DENSE HAIR

One of the biggest challenges in managing hair is the fact that one has to deal wil very large datasets. A human head contains 50,000 hair strands on average. It is quite time consuming and agonizing to model that kind of hair strand by strand. It is possible, however, to select a few of those hair and let them represent their neighbours.

So lets say out of 50,000 we picked out 50 strands, each representing a 1000 strands close to it. The neighbouring strands will obey any changes you do to the picked ones and smoothly vary over the whole hair volume. We call these 'representative' strands guides. Guides are used very often during the hair creation process to allow the user to see the approximate shape of final hair and edit it interactively without having to deal final result directly.

We call the final result dense hair. Therefore guide hair control a volume of dense hair in an indirect manner. After dense hair is generated from guides, it can be further modified to add some specific signatures to the hair volume such as clustering, curling, kink, and other per-strand detail that can further enchance the hair style.

See also: Advanced topics - Sparse and Dense hair