Depicting hair realistically in animated movies is tricky. But animators, visual effects artists, and computer scientists have been making progress in helping characters look natural.
In 2023, moviegoers watched a sunbeam light the hair of Miles Morales, the hero of the animated movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. His face had a distinct comic-book appearance. But his hair looked very…well, real. It behaved real too, not bobbing much as he darted and twisted and dived. This life-like hair is all thanks to physics and math.
Equations may seem out of place in animated movies. Yet, animators routinely—and successfully—use them to model how movie characters should, for example, move their limbs.
No amount of physics and math, however, has yet helped animators and visual effects artists make three-dimensional “reel” hair look absolutely real. That’s because hair has
