AI Can Render 3D Hair in Real Time - NVIDIA Developer News Center

Researchers from the University of Southern California, Pinscreen, and Microsoft developed a deep learning-based method that can generate full 3D hair geometry from single-view images in real time. This is the first deep learning project that can render hair in real time, the team said. "Realistic hair modeling is one of the most difficult tasks when digitizing virtual humans," the researchers said. "In contrast to objects that are easily parameterizable, like the human face, hair spans a wide range of shape variations and can be highly complex due to its volumetric structure and level of deformability in each strand." Using NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPUs with the cuDNN-accelerated PyTorch deep learning framework, the researchers trained their convolutional neural network on a dataset comprised of over 40,000 different hairstyles and 160,000 corresponding 2D orientation images rendered from random views.