Nvidia gives fake Harrison Ford better hair using spheres

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be the first game to get Nvidia’s new RTX Hair features next month. Instead of using triangles to model hair, Nvidia will use spheres to improve Harrison Ford’s virtual hair in the Indiana Jones game.

RTX Hair is designed to improve lighting and shadows, all while maintaining performance in the game and not taking up too much extra memory. It also makes Ford’s hair look fuller and more realistic, and will be available as an update to the real-time path tracing mode in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

The RTX Hair improvements use new hardware capabilities in RTX 50-series GPUs, as Nvidia added hardware acceleration of ray tracing for hair and fur and support for the linear swept sphere (LSS) primitive. Nvidia says LSS is a “big step toward rendering high-quality digital humans in real time.”