TressFX is hideous

[tomee]

Originally Posted by wearemany

I know, compared to the normal hair it did look impressive, but to me it always looked like each individual strand had its own life.

Technically each individual strand had its own life.
It wasn't until Rise that they introduced a technology of mother strands which would be followed by numerous daughter strands. That way they have individual hairs, but they don't all behave individually, only the mother strands do.

[coolaideonfire]

I mean, from a technical perspective it was probably very exciting, but aesthetically it looked awful and broke immersion because mostly everything else reacts as you'd expect then you have Lara's hair defying gravity. I always play with it turned off.

[jajay119]

I find ironic people complained so much about how unrealistic the hair wasin TR CD felt the need to go and create an entire engine just for the hair and that was even worse... but people though it was great. Clearly they didn't have an idea about what hair actually moved like. Especially when dirty, covered in blood, sweat and when it's wet cause apparently it always looks super glossy and blow dried.

[Wooxman]

So... when hair is dirty it becomes just one big squirrel tail, no matter what!? Both versions are unrealistic, but IMO TressFX is a bit more realistic than the 7th gen squirrel tail.

[Trenton]

Originally Posted by Wooxman

So... when hair is dirty it becomes just one big squirrel tail, no matter what!? Both versions are unrealistic, but IMO TressFX is a bit more realistic than the 7th gen squirrel tail.

This. Plus they gotta go ahead and actually implement stuff like that in order to advance the tech. It didn't work perfect in TR2013, but it did work fine for the most part and then that tech was further improved upon for ROTTR where it works a lot better. If developers don't dare experimenting then they'll get nowhere.

[Heidi_w_]

Originally Posted by jajay119

I find ironic people complained so much about how unrealistic the hair wasin TR CD felt the need to go and create an entire engine just for the hair and that was even worse... but people though it was great. Clearly they didn't have an idea about what hair actually moved like. Especially when dirty, covered in blood, sweat and when it's wet cause apparently it always looks super glossy and blow dried.

I loved it; it might not be perfect as it always looks clean, but it's the dawn of a new technology so it will only continue to improve. It's certainly orders of magnitude better than the traditional helmet hair featured in so many other games *coughSkyrimcough*

[Wooxman]

I'd like if Crystal used Nvidia HairWorks. Either instead of TressFX/PureHair or alongside of it (PureHair could be the standard on consoles since they use AMD graphics card and PC players could be able to chose between the two since HairWorks doesn't work with AMD cards). Nvidia HairWorks seems to use less resources than TressFX since games that utilise this technology can easily show several characters with HairWorks at the same time while TressFX/PureHair already drops the framerate while only being used on Lara.

https://developer.nvidia.com/hairworks

Interesting side note: One of the videos states that the technology is in development since 2008 and at the same time it shows a few seconds of a tech demo:


https://youtu.be/VFWr44ZIEZc?t=23s
Starting at 0:23.

I remember downloading and looking at this tech demo. But back then I thought that it would be impossible to implement this technology into a complete game since there's a huge difference between showing off graphics technologies in a tech demo that only focuses on a small room with a limited amount of characters and using the same tech in a full game where far more stuff is going on at the same time.

Here's a video of this tech demo (the music is from the actual demo):


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K8masjDBrI

And here you can get it: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/coolstuff/demos#!/nalu

The website says that the demo is even older and that it was released in 2004, but Nvidia probably didn't call their hair physics "HairWorks" until 2008.