During its SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation, Eidos Montreal revealed that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be the first title to make use of Pure Hair technology for hair simulation. For the uninitiated, Pure Hair is the successor to AMD’s TressFX technology, which was first seen in Tomb Raider. The new hair solution has been created in collaboration between AMD and Eidos Montreal’s research and development lab.
Compared to TressFX, Eidos Montreal’s R&D lab has significantly improved rendering, employing PPLL (Per-Pixel Linked List) as a translucency solution. The developer has also enhanced simulation significantly via async compute for better workload distribution.
Pure Hair was first announced back in March, bringing forth a “master and slave” strand system. Instead of simulating physics for each individual strand, it simulates a number of master strands, which are then emulated by nearby strands, making it easier for less powerful hardware to compute.
This brand new solution also poses its own unique challenges. If the master slave system isn’t implemented correctly, it can lead to the ‘dreadlock effect’. As the name implies, this unwanted effect can result in the slave strands clamping around the master strand and producing a deadlock of sorts. In order to avoid such anomalies, the developer has been in the process of fine-tuning the technology for its forthcoming Deus Ex title.
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