On 21/07/2011 02:07 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

> I seem to recall reading that in the Final Fantasy movie, they DID have
> shots where each strand of hair was made up of 3 or 4 triangles, and the
> model had 60,000 individual hairs, if I'm not mistaken. Considering that
> this movie was made over 10 years ago, one can safely assume that
> rendering a similar shot today would be next to trivial.

I had a brief look around the Internet, and failed to find any technical 
data about the film. (Other than yes, it really was 10 years ago. 
Apparently I am significantly older than I realised.)

I would have thought that 3 or 4 triangles would be nowhere near enough 
to represent a shape as complex as a strand of hair. (Although I notice 
that Aki is conspicuously straight-haired.) 60k strands of hair sounds 
like a plausible amount for one head. That gives us well in excess of 
100k triangles just for the hair; no wonder the typical render time is 
90 minutes per frame. (I'm still surprised the finished film contains 
less than 1M frames.)

Similarly, the sorts of figures I've seen vaguely suggested for the 
total poly count of the characters seems way too low. (I can hardly 
believe that in this day and age, flat polygons are still the most 
advanced technology available for representing complex curved shapes...)

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