“Curls gone wild: hair simulation in Brave” by Soares, Raja, Hurrey and Iben

In Brave, Merida’s hair is an important extension of her character. Like Merida, it is fierce, tempestuous, and unpredictable. We were tasked with the challenge of creating hair that possesses its own dramatic and expressive personality, but still appears realistic and physically convincing. To accomplish this, we engineered a hair system that produces believable, natural movement while providing simulation artists with tools to direct the hair’s motion as the story demanded. In this talk, we will discuss the techniques we developed in production to utilize a novel hair model described in [1].

1. Iben, H., Meyer, M., Petrovic, L., Soares, O., Anderson, J. and Witkin, A. 2012. Artistic simulation of curly hair. Technical Memo 12-03a, Pixar Animation Studios.