Creating realistic hair in Autodesk Maya

Abstract: This thesis work focuses on how to create realistic looking hair using only the vanilla version of Autodesk Maya. It describes two approaches, the widely used polygon-stripe based technique and the Maya built-in nHair. It also evaluates these two approaches in terms of ease of implementation, production speed and quality of final results. The conclusion is that nHair has the potential to produce realistic looking hair but contains various bugs and is not optimized at the current stage, while the polygon-stripe based approach is robust and flexible but the realism of rendering results is heavily dependent upon the skill level of artists.